Quartz (Macintosh)
Quartz is the graphics layer that sits on top of the Darwin core of Mac OS X, sometimes also referred to as CoreGraphics. Quartz directly supports Aqua by displaying two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and anti-aliasing with sub-pixel precision.Quartz supersedes Quickdraw which was used in earlier versions of the Mac OS, known as "Classic".
Quartz is based on version 1.4 of the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF — a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors and graphics of any source document, regardless of the platform used to create it.
It is descended from NeXT's Display PostScript.
Starting with Mac OS X 10.2, Quartz was extended by Quartz Extreme, which leverages OpenGL in order to render screen displays faster by presenting them as texturess within a 3D OpenGL context. This permits faster compositing of screen images using 3D hardware acceleration.
To use Quartz Extreme, the Macintosh must have an AGP video card installed with a minimum of 16 MB of VRAM.Quartz Extreme