Requirements for Quartz GL

Q: What are the system requirements for Quartz GL?

A: Quartz GL requires a video card that supports the GL_ARB_fragment_program and GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two OpenGL extensions.

Note: The nVidia GeForce FX 5200 is the most common video card supported by Mac OS X 10.5 that supports GL_ARB_fragment_program but does not support GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two. See the OpenGL Capabilities Tables for more information.

WARNING: Quartz GL is currently unsupported on Macintosh computers with more than one video card installed.

You can enable Quartz GL for all windows in your application by adding the QuartzGLEnable key to your Info.plist. A value of true indicates that you are requesting Quartz GL when available, and a value of false indicates that you do not wish to use Quartz GL, even if you request it programatically. When enabling Quartz GL through your Info.plist there is an additional requirement that at least 1GB of RAM must be installed.

Cocoa applications can programatically enable Quartz GL for a specific window using the NSWindow method setPreferredBackingLocation:. Carbon applications can call HIWindowSetBackingLocation to enable Quartz GL for a specific window. In both cases specifying the location of the window backing store as video memory enables Quartz GL for that window.

If you need to test your application under Quartz GL and your system does not meet these requirements, you can forcibly enable Quartz GL using Quartz Debug in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/.

Document Revision History

Date Notes
2008-08-08 Document the QuartzGLEnable property list key and HIWindowSetBackingLocation(). Fixed typos.
2007-12-12 Describes the requirements for enabling Quartz GL.

Posted: 2008-08-08

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