Quartz 2D

Quartz 2D is available to all macOS and iOS application environments and provides resolution-independent and device-independent rendering of bitmap graphics, text, and vectors both on-screen and in preparation for printing.

Each graphics context defines how the drawing should be presented: in a window, sent to a printer, an OpenGL layer, or off-screen.

For example, a window context may rasterize an object to the appropriate screen resolution to create actual graphics on the display.

Mac OS X 10.4 rectified this, substantially increasing the standard rendering performance of Quartz 2D.

[7] Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default in Mac OS X 10.4 because it may lead to video redraw issues or kernel panics.