Double Buffering In order to maintain fluid graphics without artifacts a technique called double buffering is deployed when rendering both 2D and 3D. The video board renders into what's referred to as a back buffer and when the image has been finalized it's flipped into the front buffer and the back buffer is cleared so that the video board can start rendering the next frame. Easy as your ABC…

Triple Buffering Triple buffering is very similar to double buffering but it adds a third buffer, by doing so video boards that support this feature can maintain a more fluid output and start taking new commands from the application sooner. Triple buffering of course ads to the memory requirements.

Texture Memory Texture memory is where 3D accelerators store the textures needed for rendering a scene. The amount of texture memory and supported texture formats affect the quality of the textures that can be used. The more texture memory you have on your video board the more textures can be used in a scene.

Z-buffer 3D accelerators use the Z-buffer memory to store depth values for all 3D objects that are to be rendered on scene in order to efficiently reduce artifacts by helping to determine which objects in a scene that will be viewable in the finished image. Z-buffering requires additional memory (often taken from the frame buffer) to function and hence increases memory requirements on today's accelerators.

Just as for Bit-depths there's a variety of Z-buffer depths, which are popular in today's 3D accelerators. The values range from 16bit to 32bit.