[cairo] Does Cairo Use Hardware Acceleration?

[Anthony Walter]

My question mirrored here with videos: http://www.codebot.org/cross/?doc=9588

I am working on an open source project that provides a unified and
simplified cross platform 2D vector animation programming interface.
It is powered by different back ends on different platforms. On
Windows it uses Direct2D when available with a fallback to GDI+. On
Linux when Gnome is available it user uses Cairo (I am also
considering a QPainter back end for KDE). On OSX and iOS the my API
implementation uses Quartz 2D.

My question is related to describing the various back ends to other
programmers using my system.

Would I be truthful if I were to describe to users of my API that the
Cairo implementation is hardware accelerated?

That is, does Cairo on a Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu 12.04,
with proprietary Nvidia drivers installed and the correct hardware
installed make much of the GPU (OpenGL) any if at all? And if so,
which portions, functions, percentage of Cairo use the GPU to
accelerate rendering? the more information I can get, the better
documentation I can provide to users of my project, and I'd be very
appreciative of your honest assessment of Cairo's performance using
different hardware.

The answers you give me might help me better describe how Cairo works.
I don't want to start off the release of my open source project by
feeding users of my project bad information. Also, if anyone can feed
me some links or information about how much of graphics hardware the
other API users, I'd appreciate that as well.

Thank you.