This paper introduces a hardware engine for rendering two-dimensional vector graphics based on the OpenVG standard in portable devices. We focus on two design challenges posed by the rendering engines: the number of vertices to represent the images and the amount of memory usage. Redundant vertices are eliminated using adaptive tessellation, in which the redundancy can be judged using a proposed cost-per-quality measure. A simplified edge-flag rendering algorithm and the scanline-based rendering scheme are adopted to reduce external memory access. The designed rendering engine occupies approximately 173 K gates and can satisfy real-time requirements of many applications when it is implemented using a 0.18 µm, 1.8 V CMOS standard cell library. An FPGA prototype using a system-on-a-chip platform has been developed and tested.