https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/graphics/hardware-accel

Hardware acceleration

Beginning in Android 3.0 (API level 11), the Android 2D rendering pipeline supports hardware acceleration, meaning that all drawing operations that are performed on a View's canvas use the GPU. Because of the increased resources required to enable hardware acceleration, your app will consume more RAM.

Hardware acceleration is enabled by default if your Target API level is >=14, but can also be explicitly enabled. If your application uses only standard views and Drawables, turning it on globally should not cause any adverse drawing effects. However, because hardware acceleration is not supported for all of the 2D drawing operations, turning it on might affect some of your custom views or drawing calls. Problems usually manifest themselves as invisible elements, exceptions, or wrongly rendered pixels. To remedy this, Android gives you the option to enable or disable hardware acceleration at multiple levels. See Control hardware acceleration.

If your application performs custom drawing, test your application on actual hardware devices with hardware acceleration turned on to find any problems. The Support for drawing operations section describes known issues with hardware acceleration and how to work around them.

