Triple buffering is a technique used to creat more frame buffers to hold data to be displayed on the video display.
Simply put, it creates 3 frame buffers. The first buffer is the one that the video card is displaying, the second is one the video card maybe rendering to be displayed next, and the third one would be for the system software to start building while the others are busy.
Each frame buffer takes up a certain amount of video ram, based on resolution and color depth. For instance, to run triple buffering at 1280x1024x32 bit color requires 3 * ((1280*1024)*(32/8)) = 15MBytes of video ram (1MB = 1024*1024). This does not count texture memory, nor any memory the video card needs for its firmware to run in.
Now, it is possible for the third buffer to reside in system memory, then only 10MB of video ram would be required for the other 2 buffers.
The idea behind triple buffering is to allow faster CPU's with slower video cards to be able to continue building frames for the video card.
A fast video card and a slow CPU would not benefit from triple buffering.
It is one of those options that really must be tried to see what gives the best results for each individual system. There is no right or wrong answer to the question, "Should I use triple-buffering?".
Hope that helps.
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
