Software rendering versus hardware rendering for am image viewer?

I am going to make a lightweight, fast imag开发者_如何学Pythone viewer. I am curious as to which would be better for this project. SFML (using opengl) or SDL (using software rendering). My assumption is hardware rendering with opengl should be faster. Is this right?

Well, as opposed to SDL. Though software rendering is usually faster, SDL is very high level and therefore slower. Downvote me if you want, but this is the truth. May I ask why you can't just use the operating system's API? Image controls are very versatile.