title: OSX pushing pixels to screen with minimum latency
body: <p>I'm trying to develop some very low-latency graphics applications and am getting really frustrated by how long it takes to draw to screen through OpenGL. Every discussion I find about it online addresses optimizing the OpenGL pipeline, but doesn't get anywhere near the results that I need. </p>
  
  <p>Check this out:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/dbz4bq67cxluhs7/MouseLatency.MOV?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/dbz4bq67cxluhs7/MouseLatency.MOV?dl=0</a></p>
  
  <p>You probably noticed this before: With a c++ OpenGL app, dragging the mouse around the screen, and drawing the mouse location in OpenGL, the OpenGL lags behind by 3 or 4 frames. Clearly OSX <em>CAN</em> draw [the cursor] to screen with very low latency, but OpenGL is much slower. So let's say I don't need to do any fancy OpenGL rendering. I just want to push pixels to screen somehow. Is there a way for me to bypass OpenGL completely and draw to screen faster? Or is this kind of functionality going to be locked inside the kernel somewhere that I can't reach it?</p>