frame buffer, coupled to the color buffer. The first chip available to a wider market was 3Dlabs' Permedia II, which supported a one-bit stencil buffer.

The bits allocated to the stencil buffer can be used to represent numerical values in the range [0, 2ⁿ-1], and also as a Boolean matrix (n is the number of allocated bits), each of which may be used to control the particular part of the scene. Any combination of these two ways of using the available memory