Swap chain

Because of these benefits, many graphics APIs require the use of a swap chain.

The first framebuffer, the screenbuffer, is the buffer that is rendered to the output of the video card.

The screenbuffer may be simply overwritten or returned to the back of the swap chain for further processing.

Each host device has at least one swap chain assigned to it, and others may be created by the client application.

Triple Buffering as described above is superior for interactive purposes such as gaming, but Direct3D swap chains of more than three buffers can be better for tasks such as presenting frames of a video where the time taken to decode each frame may be highly variable.