TABLE OF CONTENTS The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand and address many of the issues that affect the graphics performance of your applications. It also provides tips on how to debug your drawing when things aren't working as you expect.
Performance is a dynamic topic. Many of the areas discussed in this chapter evolve and change with each major release of Mac OS X. To understand performance, simply reading this chapter isn't enough. You need to keep up to date with information as it becomes available from Apple. The Apple Developer Connection website and the references at the end of this chapter will help you get the latest information about how to improve not only graphics performance but overall application performance as well.
There are many aspects to achieving excellent performance with drawing code, some of which are related to the system and some of which are under your control. The Quartz Compositor, Quartz object and memory management, and performance measurement are all key to understanding graphics performance.
The Quartz Compositor (which is part of the Mac OS X windowing system) determines how drawing appears in windows on the display. As you've seen, creating and managing Quartz objects is a key aspect of Quartz programming. By understanding the Quartz memory management and object model, you can benefit from any caching of those objects Quartz performs and avoid creating memory leaks or other memory problems. Performance measurement helps you to better understand how your code works and to...
