Difference between pygame.display.update and pygame.display.flip
Question:
Just like the title implies, is there any difference? I was using pygame.display.flip and I saw on the Internet that instead of using flip they used pygame.display.update. Which one is faster?
Answers:
flip will always update the entire screen. update also updates the entire screen, if you don’t give arguments. But, if you give surface(s) as arguments, it will update only those surfaces. So it can be faster, depending on how many surfaces you give it and their width and height.
The main difference between pygame.display.flip and pygame.display.update is, that
display.flip() will update the contents of the entire displaydisplay.update() allows to update a portion of the screen, instead of the entire area of the screen. Passing no arguments, updates the entire display
To tell PyGame which portions of the screen it should update (i.e. draw on your monitor) you can pass a single pygame.Rect object, or a sequence of them to the display.update() function. A Rect in PyGame stores a width and a height as well as a x– and y-coordinate for the position.
PyGame’s built-in dawning functions and the .blit() method for instance return a Rect, so you can simply pass it to the display.update() function in order to update only the “new” drawn area.
Due to the fact that display.update() only updates certain portions of the whole screen in comparison to display.flip(), display.update() is faster in most cases.
- pygame.display.flip() updates the whole screen.
- pygame.display.update() updates only specific section but with no arguments works similar to the pygame.display.flip().
If you are doing double-buffering then you want to be using flip(). With only a single buffer either will work, and single buffering is what you are using unless you specifically create a double buffered window, such as this:
pygame.display.set((w, h), pygame.DOUBLEBUF)
Speed will be the same really if you are doing a single, full display update once a frame, so doesn’t matter really which you use in single buffer mode.
Just like the title implies, is there any difference? I was using pygame.display.flip and I saw on the Internet that instead of using flip they used pygame.display.update. Which one is faster?
flip will always update the entire screen. update also updates the entire screen, if you don’t give arguments. But, if you give surface(s) as arguments, it will update only those surfaces. So it can be faster, depending on how many surfaces you give it and their width and height.
The main difference between pygame.display.flip and pygame.display.update is, that
display.flip()will update the contents of the entire displaydisplay.update()allows to update a portion of the screen, instead of the entire area of the screen. Passing no arguments, updates the entire display
To tell PyGame which portions of the screen it should update (i.e. draw on your monitor) you can pass a single pygame.Rect object, or a sequence of them to the display.update() function. A Rect in PyGame stores a width and a height as well as a x– and y-coordinate for the position.
PyGame’s built-in dawning functions and the .blit() method for instance return a Rect, so you can simply pass it to the display.update() function in order to update only the “new” drawn area.
Due to the fact that display.update() only updates certain portions of the whole screen in comparison to display.flip(), display.update() is faster in most cases.
- pygame.display.flip() updates the whole screen.
- pygame.display.update() updates only specific section but with no arguments works similar to the pygame.display.flip().
If you are doing double-buffering then you want to be using flip(). With only a single buffer either will work, and single buffering is what you are using unless you specifically create a double buffered window, such as this:
pygame.display.set((w, h), pygame.DOUBLEBUF)
Speed will be the same really if you are doing a single, full display update once a frame, so doesn’t matter really which you use in single buffer mode.