[cairo] Status of glitz backend

[Damian Frank]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir at pobox.com> wrote:
> Quartz is very hardware accelerated, and generally performs the best for an
> arbitrary workload.

Eh?  Unless you mean composition only, I think that's not true.  I am
not a mac expert, however.  From the Wikipedia page for Quartz:  "In
Mac OS X v10.4, Apple introduced Quartz 2D Extreme, which allows
Quartz 2D to use supported GPUs for rendering. In Mac OS X 10.4,
Quartz 2D Extreme is not enabled by default, because it may lead to
video redraw issues or kernel panics.[4] As of Mac OS X v10.5 Quartz
2D Extreme has been renamed to QuartzGL - however it still remains
disabled by default."

My understanding is that Apple has no concrete plans to make QuartzGL
the default, largely due to a lack of benefit for most applications.

It does perform composition using hardware - they call this feature
Quartz Extreme.  This is a very good thing, but it really doesn't make
the 2D rendering API hardware-accelerated.

(I'm not trashing Quartz; it does perform well, I agree.)

Damian