Video Accelerator for Quartz?

J

jeffberg

Registered
I have heard that quartz is too advanced for current video accelerator cards, that is why it takes so much CPU. Is this true, and if so, when will Apple, nVidia, or ATI make a totally custom video card designed for quartz? Also is quartz too advanced even to the point of a custom Video Card, ie New motherboard architecture or something major like that?
 
Well, it is getting accelerated, just not at the same level as before. It used to be that graphics data followed this process:

2D:
Transformation -> Blitting (Accelerated)

3D:
Transformation -> Rasterization (Accelerated) -> Blitting (Accelerated)



With Quartz's PDF engine, it has changed to this:

2D:
Transformation -> Rasterization -> Blitting (Accelerated)

3D:
Transformation -> Rasterization (Accelerated) -> Blitting (Accelerated)


There currently is no method to accelerate the rasterization process in 2D on any currently available card. Also, something to note is that adding complex rasterization to the 2D pipeline started back in 8.5 when Apple added font antialiasing. Because of the many different methods of doing 2D rasterization available, and it not being an issue until recently with OS X and WinXP, there is no standard method of sending rasterization data to a video card.

Give it a couple of years, and ATi/nVidia will get something slammed together that will support rasterization of 2D.
 
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