Quartz is the marketing name of the graphics layer of the Mac OS X operating system. Quartz is part of the Core Graphics framework. Quartz directly supports Aqua by displaying two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and anti-aliasing. Text can be rendered with sub-pixel precision but graphics are limited to more traditional anti-aliasing, which is optional although the default mode of operation.

It is often stated that Quartz "uses PDF" internally somehow (usually by people making comparisons with the Display PostScript technology used in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP), however this is categorically not the case. It is true that Quartz borrows its imaging model from the PDF specification, and a result of that is that it is easy to render or generate PDF data using Quartz, but that doesn't imply anything about the internal representation itself.

There are two components that make up Quartz:

Quartz Compositor

A compositing windowing system that manages and composites off-screen window bitmaps to create the Mac OS X user interface.

Quartz 2D

A graphics library based on the paradigms of the Portable Document Format to draw two-dimensional text and graphics.

If AltiVec is available, Quartz will take advantage of it. Quartz Compositor can be accelerated via hardware rendering on supported GPUs; this feature is marketed as Quartz Extreme. A separate technology called Quartz 2D Extreme accelerates Quartz 2D using the GPU. It was introduced in Mac OS X Tiger, though it is disabled by default and Apple strongly cautions against using it because it can lead to video redraw issues and kernel panics.

Quartz is further extended in Tiger with Core Image and Core Video, which provide real-time video and graphics manipulations.

External links

• Why Apple didn't use X for the window system (Mike Paquette, slashdot.org)
• Apple's Quartz page
• Apple's Quartz page for developers
• Introduction to OS X graphics APIs

Application programming interfaces | Graphics software | Mac OS X

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