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Everything you see on screen is the result of millions upon millions of calculations by Quartz, the revolutionary composited windowing system in Mac OS X that uses the Portable Document Format (PDF) as the basis of its imaging model. Quartz 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. Panther delivers across-the-board optimizations to Quartz that make your system more responsive, no matter the hardware. You will detect a small improvement if you have a G3 processor. You will notice faster window redraws and scrolling if you have a G4 processor. They will be simply remarkable if you have multiple G5 processors. But the real innovation comes with Quartz Extreme.  While other operating systems hope to introduce comparable technology in late 2004, Panther has it now. Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calculations. This dramatically improves system performance, making Panther much more responsive.  Panther delivers numerous other improvements to the Mac OS X graphics subsystem. Quartz delivers device-independent and resolution-independent rendering of anti-aliased text, bitmap images and vector graphics. In addition, Quartz can both save and print transparency and the Preview application honors PDF file security. A “Save as PDF” button in the Print dialog streamlines PDF creation. And Panther adds more high-quality fonts to the already exquisite collection, so those who use non-Roman languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai can communicate in their native tongue. |
Related Features
 Aqua The Mac OS X user experience. Exposé Find the window you need. Now. Fast User Switching Share well with others. Finder Everything you need, just a click away. Quartz Never again compromise quality. Here’s how it works 
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 do more operations in the same amount of time. Drawing windows, resizing, moving, scrolling — everything is zippier. And Panther even improves upon the considerable speed gains in Mac OS X.Quartz Extreme Requirements Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required. |
