10.4: Permanently enable Quartz 2D Extreme

May 09, '05 11:05:00AM

Contributed by: doggkruse

Tiger only hintTiger includes a major new graphics technology called Quartz 2D Extreme. Note that this is not the same as Quartz Extreme! Unfortunately, Apple has chosen not to enable this feature by default. It is possible to enable it temporarily via a menu option using the Quartz Debug application included with the Developer Tools. In order to enable it permanently, we have to do a little more work.

One way is to force quit the Quartz Debug application after you have enabled Quartz 2D Extreme from the menu -- quitting normally will disable it again. It is also possible to edit the plist file that controls this feature directly. This file is located in /Library/Preferences, and it's named com.apple.windowserver.plist. Change the Quartz2DExtremeEnabled value to YES. Both of these methods keep Quartz 2D Extreme enabled across reboots.

For more info on Quartz 2D Extreme, see these articles:

[robg adds: The ArsTechnica review goes into great detail on Quartz 2D Extreme (and nearly every other element of OS X 10.4; it's a great review), and explains what it should do, what apps must do to take advantage of it, and more. I'm assuming that if it shipped disabled by default on all machines, there was some sort of reason for that, so I've chosen to leave it off. I did experiment with it, but didn't notice any really dramatic differences in performance. Note that, at least according to the MacNN forums thread linked above, you'll need 512MB of system RAM, as well as a newer video card for this to work.]

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