Quartz Extreme requires millions of colors

Issue or symptom

Quartz Extreme is disabled if you use a color setting of Thousands or 256 colors in Display preferences (16-bit and 8-bit, respectively). When Quartz Extreme is disabled in these color modes, you may not be able to use iMovie, and some Mac OS X effects may not render properly (such as the cube effect when changing users via Fast User Switching, or the ripple effect when adding widgets in Dashboard).

Solution

Open Displays preferences and select Millions from the Colors pop-up menu.

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