Memory Usage and Triple Buffering
Triple buffering seems like the perfect solution to cure low frame rate, however, it does not come free. Enable triple buffering also means it requires 50% more frame buffer spaces. Under certain conditions, it can also negatively impact your gaming experience. A simple example can illustrate this potential problem. Let's say we are running a game at 1600x1200 resolution. Each pixel needs 32 bits to store the information, 1600x1200x32 = 61,440,000 bits, converting it to megabytes, it equals to 7.32MB. To use double buffering, it requires 14.64MB video memories; to use triple buffering, it requires 21.96MB video memories. Heck, it's only 21.96MB, what's the big deal? Modern video cards have 256MB video rams onboard. You are certainly right, it does not seem like memory usage would be an issue. However, once we enabled 4x FSAA, the number gets inflated really fast. With 4x FSAA enabled, there are 4 times more pixels being sampled, thus you need to multiple 21.96MB by 4 and it's whopping 87.84MB! That's more than 1/3 of your total video ram. If a game requires 200MB of space to store textures, light maps, bump maps, normal maps......etc., you are going to have a very bad gameplay experience with lots of pauses caused by hard drives accesses. This is just something to watch out for, if you find the game accessing the hard drive too frequently, it can be an indication that triple buffering is eating up too much of your video memories.