Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

operating system, Quartz is the

Quartz 2D Quartz 2D is the native two-dimensional graphics rendering API for macOS and iOS platforms, part of the Core Graphics framework. Overview Quartz 2D is available to all macOS and iOS application environments and provides resolution-independent and ...

and

Quartz Compositor Quartz Compositor is the display server (and at the same time the compositing window manager) in macOS. It is responsible for presenting and maintaining rasterized, rendered graphics from the rest of the Core Graphics framework and other ren ...

part of the Core Graphics framework. Quartz includes both a 2D renderer in Core Graphics and the composition engine that sends instructions to the graphics card. Because of this vertical nature, ''Quartz'' is often synonymous with ''Core Graphics''. In a general sense, ''Quartz'' or ''Quartz technologies'' can refer to almost every part of the graphics model from the rendering layer down to the compositor including Core Image and Core Video. Other Apple graphics technologies that use the "Quartz" prefix include these: * Quartz Extreme * QuartzGL (originally Quartz 2D Extreme) * QuartzCore * Quartz Display Services * Quartz Event Services

Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor

is the primary two-dimensional (2D) text and graphics rendering library: It directly supports

Aqua Aqua is the Latin word for water. As such, it is often used in many words which relate to water, such as aquatic life. In English, it may also refer to: Arts * Aqua (color), a greenish-blue color Business * Aqua (Chicago), an 82-story resid ...

by displaying two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and

anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used b ...

. Quartz can render text with sub-pixel precision; graphics are limited to more traditional anti-aliasing, which is the default mode of operation but can be turned off. In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced Quartz 2D Extreme, enabling Quartz 2D to offload rendering to compatible

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s. However, GPU rendering was not enabled by default due to potential video redraw issues or

kernel panic A kernel panic (sometimes abbreviated as KP) is a safety measure taken by an operating system's Kernel (operating system), kernel upon detecting an internal Fatal system error, fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or con ...

s. In Mac OS X v10.5 Quartz 2D Extreme was renamed to QuartzGL. The

is the

compositing Compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live action, Live-action shooting for compositing ...

engine used by

. In Mac OS X Jaguar and later, the Quartz Compositor can use the graphics accelerator (GPU) to vastly improve composition performance. This technology is known as Quartz Extreme and is enabled automatically on systems with supported graphics cards.

Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor

See also

References

External links