a lil confusion over quartz extreme

[zuggerat]

Im a lil confused about this quartz extreme stuff. Whats the difference between quartz and quartz extreme. Is it embedded in OS X or is a enable disable kind of option. how do i know it's working and if its off how can i turn it on?

 

[robbieduncan]

Quartz is the rendering layer in Mac OSX. It enables the system to draw and layer windows and widgets as well as providing drawing services to apps so as they can draw paths and the like.

Quartz Extreme is a hardware accelerated version of Quartz. QE accelerated the compositing layer ONLY. Each window on screen is loaded onto the graphics card as an OpenGL texture. The graphics hardware then deals with the layering and compositing operations for the system.

QE is not a user configurable option. If your machine is capable of supporting QE it will be turned on. If you want to see what a QE machine is like without it turned on install the developer tools and try the Quartz Debug app. Note that this cannot enable QE on a non-QE capable system.

 

[stoid]

Quartz is the PDF-based graphics system that runs Mac OS X. In Jaguar Quartz was replaced by Quartz Extreme. The big difference besides updated and more streamlined code is that Quartz Extreme put the graphics rendering off to the graphics card rather than have it depend upon the CPU. While this is great for newer systems, it meant that Jaguar had high graphics cards requirements alienating some older system owners.


edit: %@^&# I got beaten to the punch!

"Curse my metal body! I wasn't fast enough!" - C3PO

 

[zuggerat]

so with a radeon 9000 card in a 1 ghz ti book...im definitely utilizing QE?

 

[ShadowHunter]

Originally posted by zuggerat
so with a radeon 9000 card in a 1 ghz ti book...im definitely utilizing QE?

That's a big 10-4 there, little buddy