Quartz provides essential graphics services for applications in two integral parts: the Quartz 2D graphics API and the Quartz Extreme windowing environment. Quartz 2D’s rich graphics capabilities are based on the Portable Document Format (PDF) and provides professional-strength 2D graphics features such as Bezier curves, transformations and gradients. Acting as an advanced “visual mixing board,” Quartz Extreme manages an application’s onscreen presentation and delivers responsive, GPU-accelerated window compositing with full support for transparency.