Hacker News Reader

Indeed it does, and you can use it to draw accelerated scaled and rotated images, lines, and rectangles. There are even a few blending modes available. It's a nice foundation for simple cross-platform 2D graphics, it's come a long way since SDL1.

SDL2's render API can use GPU acceleration, however its feature set is rather limited. This is plenty for many, however is incomplete for others. I've heard its feature set be referred to as 'SNES-level graphics', or something to that effect, from at least one SDL-internals dev, something which I'd also echo.

There's also old SDL's rival, Allegro 5, which also provides nice GPU accelerated graphics API.