An area of memory (RAM) used to hold the frame of data that is continuously being sent to the screen. The frame buffer is the size of the maximum image that can be displayed, and it may be a separate memory bank on the graphics card (display adapter), GPU or a reserved part of regular memory. Today's sophisticated graphics systems are built with several memory planes, each holding one or more bits of the pixel. See
video RAM and
GPU. See also
frame grabber.