What are the requirements to use triple buffering?

[nhat11]

Does it have to have vsync on and does it work with all games too?

 

[bystander]

Most games have built in triple buffering these days. However, OpenGL games allow you to force it on, even if it is not programmed into the game. The setting to turn on triple buffering only applies to OpenGL games.

The setting may be useable without v-sync, but it is only useful with v-sync on.

 

[nhat11]

Built in triple buffering? That means I can't turn it off manually?

 

[bystander]

Despite what may have been written in the past, triple buffering has no negative aspect.

 

[aicom]

Despite what may have been written in the past, triple buffering has no negative aspect.

Not completely true, but mostly. If you're strained on VRAM, triple buffering is going to tank your performance. The way triple buffering works is by providing 3 rendering surfaces that the game can draw to. It uses a page flipping model to have one buffer on screen while two are eligible for rendering by the application. This allows the application to be able to rending before, during, and after the page flip which helps performance. This obviously costs a bit of VRAM since the surfaces are usually sized equal to the output resolution.

 

[bystander]

I guess that's possible, but extremely rare with the size of VRAM we have these days. For a 1080p monitor, that amounts to 8MB's of VRAM usage.

 

[mactronix]

I would be curious and ask why you want to use triple buffering, or is this just for info ?

Mactronix

 

[nhat11]

I would be curious and ask why you want to use triple buffering, or is this just for info ?

Mactronix

Increase the FPS for a game my friend has. He doesn't have a budget to buy a new PC and he can play the game at around 20 fps but it would be nice to bump it up.

In SC2, someone used triple buffering and it bumped his fps from 30 to 60. He was please with the results.

 

[bystander]

Triple buffering would only improve performance if v-sync was on, because v-sync can sometimes hurt performance a lot.

In your SC2 example, the person has v-sync on, but not able to achieve a 60 FPS consistently, which cause the FPS to drop to 30, and triple buffering helped to minimize the loss of FPS.

If he has this problem, he should just turn off v-sync, if he has it on. If he doesn't have v-sync on, nothing would help him gain more FPS other than turning down settings.

 

[nhat11]

Best answer selected by nhat11.