A global composition system is described. In one or more implementations, the global composition system may be configured to perform rendering for a plurality of applications. For example, the global composition system may be configured to expose one or more application programming interfaces (APIs) that are accessible to the applications. The APIs may then be used to cause a single composition engine to perform the rendering for the plurality of applications. The use of a single composition engine may be used to support a variety of different functionality, such as to perform efficient rendering by knowing what elements are provided by each of the applications and how those items relate for rendering to a display device.