In triple buffering you have three screen buffers. You draw to the backmost one and then you have like an interrupt timer which triggers off interrupt code to do a Flip(0) ie copy or display the backbuffer to the visible screen in sync with the vertical blank, but inbetween the time that the current buffer is drawing and the vertical blank starts you have some time to spare so you start working on a second buffer. The idea is to use all the processing time rather than waste it waiting for the vblank.
It doesn't really have anything to do with these `intermediate buffers` that you're talking about. I think you mean that you have an off-screen buffer that you keep and which never actually flips, and so you can do old-school scrolling techniques, and thus copy the existing content over itself at a new offset to scroll efficiently, as explained by RossC. You could do the same in OpenGL and DirectX easily enough, it's just that it's not a standard Max feature.
It doesn't really have anything to do with these `intermediate buffers` that you're talking about. I think you mean that you have an off-screen buffer that you keep and which never actually flips, and so you can do old-school scrolling techniques, and thus copy the existing content over itself at a new offset to scroll efficiently, as explained by RossC. You could do the same in OpenGL and DirectX easily enough, it's just that it's not a standard Max feature.