ARCHIVED: For Mac OS X, what are Quartz and Quartz Extreme?

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Quartz is an essential part of the graphics system in Mac OS X. Quartz is partially based on the Portable Document Format (PDF) standard, and allows anti-aliasing, rendering, and compositing of PostScript graphics. Quartz also draws the Aqua user interface.

Aqua uses Quartz for many of its special effects. For example, windows have drop shadows to add depth, menus and dialog boxes can be partially transparent, default buttons can pulsate to give the user clues, and all on-screen text is anti-aliased. The Dock has a magnification option that uses Quartz to quickly scale images.

Quartz Extreme, introduced in Mac OS X 10.2, is an enhanced version of Quartz that takes advantage of modern video cards to accelerate certain display functions and animations. With Quartz Extreme, image processing is performed with the graphics card instead of the CPU, making the whole computer more responsive.