We're not talking about plugins, we're talking about something inherent to the operating system itself, and the way in which it handles graphical output.
At it's most fundamental level, Apple's OS X operating system uses QE/CI for GPU Acceleration.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I don't know in full what the internal development process is at Serato, but I've long suspected (as is well documented in my post history on this forum; and that theory was extrapolated from the processes observed, and what little data Serato provides about their internal workings) that Serato develops on OS X first, and then ports to Windows.
OS X natively, through Quartz (especially if you use Quartz Composer) - it's display server - offloads a significant chunk of graphical work to the GPU (if available) for management rather than handle it at the CPU level.
While Windows does as well (mostly with the advent of Aero roughly around Windows Vista), it does not fully accelerate every single element of the entire desktop (including active applications) like OS X does. This is not a bug, nor a flaw. It is by design. This offsets the responsibility onto the developer to choose how best to manage acceleration of their program (should they choose to do so). I.E., they can choose GDI or Direct2D (DirectDraw was killed off years ago) - more reading on that here:
msdn.microsoft.com.
One of the goals of Windows 8 was to, like OS X, accelerate
EVERYTHING (
blogs.msdn.com). However, that primarily only applied to Microsoft's first-party applications, and the requirement was only laid upon applications obtained via the Application Store. For all other applications, it still remains incumbent on developers to do their part. Hence, this is where we currently are with Serato on Windows.
