Although most display drivers are intended to allow specific hardware displays to be used with the TivaWare Graphics Library, three special drivers are included within the library itself. These drivers are intended for off-screen graphics rendering in 1 bpp (bit per pixel), 4 bpp, and 8 bpp formats and are typically used in combination with a driver which supports the physical display. These drivers support the standard display driver interface and may be used alongside other display drivers.

The main use for an off-screen display driver is to support applications which require smooth animation or which render an image slowly. In these cases, an image is drawn into a memory buffer using the offscreen display driver and, once the image is completed, it is transferred to the physical display in one operation. Since the rendering of the image takes many steps and may include erasing the entire buffer before starting to redraw, using an off-screen display driver allows flicker-free operation. The physical display continues to show the previous image until a new one is ready for display, at which point the image is updated so quickly that the user does not see any of the intervening graphic operations that were required to generate the new image.

Source for the off-screen display drivers can be found in the offscr1bpp.c, offscr4bpp.c, and offscr8bpp.c files in the C:\ti\TivaWare_C_Series-2.2.0.295\grlib directory.