From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Quartz is the graphics engine in Mac OS X. Quartz directly supports Aqua by displaying two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and anti-aliasing. Quartz is based on the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF is 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.
The Technology is superseding QuickDraw which was used in earlier versions of the Mac OS. Quartz is extended by Quartz Extreme from version 10.2 of the Mac OS X Operating System, which leverages OpenGL in order to render screen displays faster by presenting them as textures within a 3D OpenGL context. This permits faster compositing of screen images using 3D hardware acceleration.
