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Old 04-22-2019, 02:01 AM   #417
Xaos
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 158
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lokasenna View Post
"Yet"? They've always been able to. In fact, it's likely there's at least one SVG (the standard vector format) on this very page.

Vector graphics just means "draw a line from this point to this point, draw a curve with this radius from here to here" instead of "this pixel is red, this pixel is white, this pixel is white". There's nothing particularly magical about it, it's just that most software isn't written with it in mind.
I understand vector vs raster. I worked in graphic design for 16 years. What I mean is in the original Core Graphics OS X used the PDF graphic technology to render the onscreen graphics, which is why it was so easy to just print to a PDF. Then they built vector support into the core graphics of of the OS so that it could use scalable vector information to draw the onscreen graphics. This is very different from having an application render it. It's native to the operating system's graphic engine and developers can make calls to the OS libraries instead of writing the code into their app, which is much less efficient because it doesn't have direct access to the hardware.

A good analogy of this is Windows audio. To run audio software at low latency, you have to have the ASIO driver, while the Mac has low latency audio natively because Core Audio was designed to let applications make calls to low levels of the OS, effectively giving them direct access to the hardware. No third party software needed.
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Last edited by Xaos; 04-22-2019 at 02:06 AM.
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