Is drawing through the Canvas class hardware accelerated on Android?

Question

Are calls to Canvas.drawPath()/drawArc()/etc hardware accelerated, passed to a device native implementation or implemented in Java?

Or is OpenGL the only way to achieve hardware accelerated drawing?

I am trying to determine if it is feasible to use the Canvas API for realtime animation.

Answer 1

currently Canvas is not hardware accelerated.

there are hints in the source code which point to the plans of implementing wrapping canvas calls around so HW accelerator, but it's not functional as of now.

Answer 2

For progress on this matter check:

Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=573207

Chrome: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=30946