In
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
's
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
operating system, Quartz is the
Quartz 2D 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
Quartz 2D is the primary two-dimensional (2D) text and graphics rendering library: It directly supports
Aqua
Aqua is the Latin word for water. It is 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 (skyscraper), an 82-story residential skysc ...
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 be ...
. 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 to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
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 upon detecting an internal fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or continuing to run the system would have a higher ...
s.
In
Mac OS X v10.5 Quartz 2D Extreme was renamed to QuartzGL. However, it still remains disabled by default, as there are some situations where it can degrade performance, or experience visual glitches; it is a per-application setting which can be turned on if the developer wishes.
The
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 ...
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 is ...
engine used by
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
. 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.
Use of PDF
It is widely stated that Quartz "uses
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
internally" (notably by Apple in their 2000
Macworld
''Macworld'' is a website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc. It started life as a print magazine in 1984 and had the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macint ...
presentation and Quartz's early developer documentation), often by people making comparisons with the
Display PostScript
Display PostScript (or DPS) is a 2D graphics engine system for computers which uses the PostScript (PS) imaging model and language (originally developed for computer printing) to generate on-screen graphics. To the basic PS system, DPS adds a num ...
technology used in
NeXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprieta ...
and
OPENSTEP
OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was ...
(of which is a descendant). Quartz's internal imaging model correlates well with the PDF object graph, making it easy to output PDF to multiple devices.
See also
*
Quartz Composer
Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in macOS for processing and rendering graphical data.
Quartz Composer uses OpenGL (including GLSL), OpenCL (only in Mac OS X Snow ...
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 APIsCocoa Graphics with Quartz: Part 1Cocoa Graphics with Quartz: Part 2
{{macOS
Graphics software
MacOS