Ah, thanks for that clarification; I'm pretty ignorant about graphics. Good to know that Mesa will be fast in this case. I tried running full-blown GNOME on an ARM board (Wandboard) without proper driver support for the GPU, and GNOME Shell used ~40% of a CPU at idle. I'm guessing that something like Sway, even though it uses OpenGL, is less demanding.
Even with software rendering, a wlroots compositor should use 0% when idle thanks to damage tracking (ie. only redrawing parts of the screen that changed).
