What's the difference between Quartz Core, Core Graphics and Quartz 2D?

Quartz frameworks and their APIs

CoreGraphics.framework

Quartz
2D API manages the graphic context and implements drawing.

Quartz
Services API provides low level access to the window server. This includes display hardware, resolution, refresh rate, and others.

QuartzCore.framework

Core
Animation: Objective-C API to do 2D animation.

Core
Image: image and video processing (filters, warp, transitions).iOS 5

Quartz.framework

OS
X only

Image
Kit: display and edit images.

PDF
Kit: display and edit PDFs.

Quartz
Composer: display Quartz Composer compositions.

QuickLookUI: preview media elements.

All three frameworks use OpenGL underneath because all drawing in iOS or OS X goes through OpenGL at some point. See the section Media
Layer Frameworks of the Mac OS X Technology Overview for details.

Other "Quartz" technologies you may have heard of:

Quartz Extreme: GPU acceleration for Quartz Composer.

QuartzGL (aka "Quartz 2D Extreme"): GPU acceleration for Quartz 2D.

These are internal implementations of GPU rendering, not APIs. They decide whether to create the window buffer in the CPU and only use OpenGL to upload as a texture (the default) or to do the whole rendering using OpenGL, which not
always improves performance. You can alternate between the two using the QuartzGLEnable Info.plist
setting. For an explanation see John Siracusa review of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, pages 13 and 14.

“Quartz” and “Core” are marketing names sprinkled over frameworks and APIs in a random manner. If they wanted to create a confusing naming mess, they
succeeded.

原文地址：http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1877987/whats-the-difference-between-quartz-core-core-graphics-and-quartz-2d