Rendering APIs typically provide just enough functionality to abstract a graphics accelerator, focussing on rendering primitives, state management, command lists/command buffers; and as such differ from fully fledged 3D graphics libraries, 3D engines (which handle scene graphs, lights, animation, materials etc.), and GUI frameworks; Some provide fallback software rasterisers, which were important for compatibility and adoption before graphics accelerators became widespread.

Some have been extended to include support for compute shaders.

Low level rendering APIs typically leave more responsibility with the user for resource memory management, and require more verbose control, but have significantly lower CPU overhead,^[1] and allow greater utilisation of multicore processors.

2D rendering APIs

• OpenVG
• Direct2D
• Quartz 2D
• Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG)
• Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
• Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML)
• X11
• Cairo
• Skia
• Qt GUI primitive rendering abstractions, on which Qt widgets are built
• Blend2D
• HTML5 Canvas element

Offline rendering

• RenderMan aimed at offline rendering for CG films.

Software rasterising

As of 2016, these are generally considered obsolete, but were still important during the transition to hardware acceleration:

• BRender by argonaut software

3D rendering APIs

These libraries are designed explicitly to abstract 3D graphics hardware for CAD and video games, with possible software fallbacks.