Quartz question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D

2D Extreme uses the GPU to render the raster image. It is currently disabled in Tiger. You can enable it in Quartz Debug utility, but you'll need to use an app that supports it, which is rare.

howesey said:

2D Extreme uses the GPU to render the raster image. It is currently disabled in Tiger. You can enable it in Quartz Debug utility, but you'll need to use an app that supports it, which is rare.

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Not quite true. They way it is meant to work is that the App does not even know if it's turned on. It draws via normal Quartz calls and then get drawn on the GPU if appropriate. The reason it is not turned on is that it tends to not work properly at the moment (screen corruption, random crashes...)

Basically Quartz 2D Extreme draws the contents of windows on the graphics card, and Quartz Extreme combines the image of each window into the image for the screen on the graphics card (including handling stuff like transparent windows and window shadows). Quartz Extreme has been around since 10.2. Quartz 2D Extreme is new in 10.4, and has been known to cause kernel panics and display glitches, so it's disabled. Q2DX also has rather steep hardware requirements; it relies on some very fancy graphics card features.