Evas delegates most of the actual rendering work to its engines. Engines are the backends that Evas uses to render (primitive) objects on a canvas. The canvas can be the screen, or a buffer in the memory.

Evas can work with and provides multiple engines, such as (this list is non-exhaustive):

• buffer: all the rendering takes place in a buffer
• fb: the rendering takes place in the system's framebuffer
• software_x11: this is the most used, using X11
• gl_x11: this also renders to an X11 window, except that it uses OpenGL

These implement the rendering of all the basic objects by themselves, because they often can be accelerated by the hardware or backend software libraries to provide fast rendering.

If a particular engine does not have the provision for a certain primitive object, it reverts back to using a default software version.