Difference between pygame.display.update and pygame.display.flip

The main difference between pygame.display.flip and pygame.display.update is, that

• display.flip() will update the contents of the entire display
• display.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().

Flip will always update the entire screen. Update also update the entire screen, if you don't give argument. But if you give surface(s) as arguments, it will update only these surfaces. So it can be faster, depending on how many surfaces you give it and their width and height.