I'm currently developing a tile base engine. I want it to look like your average old school tilebased RPG like Zelda - Link to the past (orthographic projection, squared tile texture, textures overlapping each other, alpha channels, etc.). The twist is that the world is internally 3d meaning that every tile has an elevation and entities are moving in a 3d space. Reason for this is beyond the scope of this question but I'm struggling on comparing the follow two ideas for the rendering. I'm using OpenGL with libGDX in Java but wouldn't mind writing my own code to interface OpenGL. That's also why I didn't tag it.
A screenshot of "Zelda - Link to the past" in case you don't know what it looks like.
Painter algorithm
Disable Z-Buffer and use painter algorithm to draw from back to front in the appropriate order with some overdraw and a lot of texture rebinding. I know a texture atlas can minimize the texture rebinding but the engine is supposed to act more like a sandbox so I don't want to rely too heavily on assumptions like a efficient texture atlas that I might not have all the time.
Pro: Easy to implement and very straight forward.
Con: I've no idea how big the impact will be since almost every sprite will cause a texture rebinding. And I don't know how to predict the performance costs of that many texture bind calls.
Full blown 3D
Rotate the camera 45 degrees up around the x axis with an orthographic projection matrix. Then use the 3d information from the game world to draw the tile textures with billboarding at the real position in the worlds 3d space. Same for entities and such. This way I can gather all sprites and then render them sorted by their texture which means one texture bind per texture and reduced overdraw due to usage of the Z-buffer
Pro: I can use a freecam to debug render problems. I assume it's significantly faster that the painter algorithm.
Con: Some sprites might share the same place which could lead to Z-fighting. I'm thinking about how to use multiple layers on a tile. For instance you may have a bridge tile with a railing where the railing is always overlapping an entity on the bridge but the floor of it is always overlapped by the entity. So I would have to add a little offset to different layers in the 3d space. I'm not really sure how that would work out and to be honest had a hard time figuring out how old games did it so maybe I'm overthinking it.
I guess I have a very rough idea of how each method will work out but I don't know how much the texture rebinding (or sorting and preparing the sprites for the 3d approach) is affecting the performance and while it's easy to find information regarding large 3D scenes I found it difficult to get information about 2D scenes with way less polygons.I hope this question is not too much a subject of personal preference. I know that Premature optimization is the root of all evil but due to how the decision is affecting almost the entire rendering process I don't want to make the wrong call.
I deliberately didn't mention any OpenGL functions mainly because I've mostly used the libGDX API which hides the function calls behind it's wrappers but generally I know how the internals work and just got into the internals and how the OpenGL API works. I don't think specific OpenGL calls do matter for the question but feel free to use them for your answer I'll just look them up.