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Comment by wmf

13 years ago

AFAIK, OS X has been running fine (not super-fast, but acceptable) without 2D acceleration for 13 years.

Also, doesn't Compiz still have some tearing or artifacting during window resize? Wayland is supposed to eliminate that.

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wmf

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monkeyfacebag  13 years ago

I'm confused, I thought 2D acceleration was introduced with 10.4. I'm not a Mac user, so I'm not sure, but Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_%28graphics_layer%29) seems to agree.

  • wmf  13 years ago

    "Quartz 2D Extreme ... still remains disabled by default" Somebody correct me if this is wrong.

    • glhaynes  13 years ago

      IIRC, Quartz 2D Extreme (later referred to as QuartzGL) had to do with hardware-assisted rendering/compositing of things like text and certain primitives and, afaik, most of that is still not turned on in shipping OS X and likely never will be. (Again, iirc: it turned out to not provide much benefit compared to the substantial trouble of making the output the same between different video cards.) Perhaps some of that has moved to OpenCL to get the same effect but from a more appropriate layer? I really don't know.

      But when you drag a window around or invoke Mission Control, etc, all of that is "Quartz Extreme" (a marketing label that hasn't been used much in a while), which is hardware-assisted and has been since 10.2. Is rendering of the shadow cast by each window accelerated, and if so, how? Again, not sure.

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