When you move, resize and scroll windows in real time on Mac OS X, you're witnessing the power of Quartz Extreme. Combining the performance of modern graphics cards and OpenGL with the visual quality of the Quartz 2D window-compositing system, Quartz Extreme delivers responsiveness you won't find anywhere else.

Blink and You'll Miss It

Every time you move or resize a window on your Mac, Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen. The graphics processor focuses on what it does best — graphics — freeing the PowerPC chip to perform more operations in the same amount of time. Drawing windows, resizing, moving, scrolling — everything is zippier.

See 2D, 3D and 4D Simultaneously

Everything you see on screen is the result of millions upon millions of calculations by Quartz 2D, the revolutionary composited windowing system in Mac OS X that uses the Portable Document Format (PDF) as the basis of its imaging model. Quartz 2D delivers crisp graphics, anti-aliased fonts, and blends 2D, 3D and QuickTime content together with transparency and drop shadows. No other operating system delivers the high-quality graphics rendering of Quartz 2D.