You cannot always trust what Eclipse and an AVD will use for drawables, especially for newer XXHDPI devices. See my post here: Drawable-xxxx : Eclipse Versus AVD.
The folder used by Eclipse (in design view) and what an AVD uses is NOT the same as a real device will use. However, the result will look the same. So, they may choose images in the XHDPI folder, whereas a real device will use the XXHDPI folder, but they try to emulate the display as close as possible. So, what you see in an AVD looks almost the same as a real device. So, an AVD I created to emulate an LG G2 looks very close to what my real LG G2 looks like, even though they are using different folders.
The bottom line is that the way a real device selects what folder to use and the algorithms used to scale it are not the same that our development and testing tools use.
I have only used Eclipse/ADT though. Maybe Android Studio is different?