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Introduction to Drawing Performance Guidelines

Contents:

Organization of This Document

Unless you’re writing a command-line tool, your drawing code is an important area to tune for performance. Your application’s main drawing routines are called frequently to update the content of your windows. The faster these routines do their job, the more time there is for your application to do actual work.

This programming topic describes some basic ways to improve drawing performance in your code.

Organization of This Document

This programming topic contains the following articles:

• “Carbon and Mac OS X Graphics” describes some of the interactions between Carbon and Mac OS X and how to take advantage of those interactions in your Carbon drawing code.

• “Carbon Drawing Tips” provides tips on how to improve the drawing code of Carbon applications.

• “Cocoa Drawing Tips” provides tips on how to improve the drawing code of Cocoa applications.

• “Measuring Drawing Performance” shows you how to find poorly performing drawing code in your applications.

• “Flushing to the Window Buffer” describes issues surrounding the coalesced updates feature introduced in Mac OS X v10.4.

• “Carbon Live Window Resizing” describes techniques for improving performance in live window resizing code for Carbon applications.

• “Cocoa Live Window Resizing” describes techniques for improving performance in live window resizing code for Cocoa applications.

• “Improving NSBezierPath Rendering Times” describes ways to speed up drawing operations involving the NSBezierPath object.

• “Improving QuickDraw Performance” describes techniques for speeding up QuickDraw drawing operations.

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