"Quartz is the basis for virtually all Mac OS X graphics and the window server. "
I think that's wrong now. Quartz and OpenGL are arguably as important as the other in modern Mac OS X. Quartz relies on OpenGL to composite and draw on screen, OpenGL relies on Quartz for high-quality rasterizing of vector graphics. OpenGL is used more and more in plain application UIs, such as the cover art view in iTunes 7. What makes Mac OS X great is the synergy between those two.
A few other points:
• Core Animation isn't a graphics library more than it is a layering / compositing / animation framework. OpenGL and Quartz generate images or graphic objects, Core Animation manipulates and arranges in space and time.
• Core Video truly is a buffer management and timing framework aimed at video sequences. It provides numerous types of buffers and buffer pools generally differentiated by the backing store of the buffers (main memory, GPU VRAM or OpenGL texture in GPU VRAM). It's main usage is real-time video processing because it's been integrated into QuickTime's decoding and encoding APIs. It could be used for any kind of buffer management problems. such as GPUGP.
by Jean-Franois Roy — Sep 22
I think that's wrong now. Quartz and OpenGL are arguably as important as the other in modern Mac OS X. Quartz relies on OpenGL to composite and draw on screen, OpenGL relies on Quartz for high-quality rasterizing of vector graphics. OpenGL is used more and more in plain application UIs, such as the cover art view in iTunes 7. What makes Mac OS X great is the synergy between those two.
A few other points:
• Core Animation isn't a graphics library more than it is a layering / compositing / animation framework. OpenGL and Quartz generate images or graphic objects, Core Animation manipulates and arranges in space and time.
• Core Video truly is a buffer management and timing framework aimed at video sequences. It provides numerous types of buffers and buffer pools generally differentiated by the backing store of the buffers (main memory, GPU VRAM or OpenGL texture in GPU VRAM). It's main usage is real-time video processing because it's been integrated into QuickTime's decoding and encoding APIs. It could be used for any kind of buffer management problems. such as GPUGP.
• Mac OS X is awesome :)