Hey,

When you render things (I''m assuming by the look of it that this is DirectX), you''re actually rendering to a backbuffer. After you finish rendering a single screen, you flip this buffer so that it''s visible on the screen. This eliminates any flickering in your animations.

You can have more than 1 backbuffer. Just using 1 is called double buffering, 2 is triple buffering, and 3... I dunno, let''s call it quatra-buffering. :-)

Normally, when you do the flipping in a double-buffered system, you wait for the vertical retrace of the monitor before flipping. This makes sure an effect called "shearing" doesn''t happen. However, you could be waiting a while before the flip takes place. In standard double-buffered system, you can''t do anything during this wait - if you do any rendering, you''ll mess something up since 1 surface is being shown and 1 surface was just drawn. However, if you''re on a triple-buffered or more system, you don''t have to wait until the flip happens to draw the next frame. 1 surface is shown, 1 surface was just drawn, and in the wait to flip those two surfaces you can render your next frame to another surface.

The downside is memory - using more buffers obviously takes up significantly more memory.

I don''t know if I explained that too well, but I hope I did.
--Brian