In
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 ...
's
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 and
Quartz Compositor 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
Quartz 2D is the primary two-dimensional (2D) text and graphics rendering library: It directly supports
Aqua by displaying
two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly
rendering and
anti-aliasing. 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
GPUs. However, GPU rendering was not enabled by default due to potential video redraw issues or
kernel panics.
In
Mac OS X v10.5 Quartz 2D Extreme was renamed to QuartzGL.
The
Quartz Compositor is the
compositing engine used by
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 ...
. 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.
See also
*
Quartz Composer
References
External links
Quartz 2D Programming Guideat developer.apple.com
Core Graphics API Referenceat developer.apple.com
Quartz in Tiger(from a review of 10.4 in Ars Technica)
Introduction to OS X graphics APIs*
*
{{macOS
Graphics software
MacOS