Z-fighting is the flickering effect you see when two surfaces are so close together that the GPU can’t reliably decide which one is in front. As the camera moves you see noisy pixels on those surfaces.
Where does Z-Fighting happen?
In Unity you usually notice Z-Fighting on walls or floors that overlap or when you have two identical objects overlapping each other.
Unity uses a depth buffer( Z-buffer) where each pixel stores a depth value. Those values have limited precision. If two polygons end up with almost the same depth, then floating point rounding decides who wins on that frame.
How to fix Z-Fighting in Unity?
The best reliable fix is to create clean meshes that do not share the same surface. Camera clip plane tuning, depth bias, and render queue tweaks can reduce how often you see Z-fighting, but they are mitigations, not root-cause fixes. Treat “better meshes” as the core solution and everything else as supportive tools.
- Create clean meshes.
- If two objects sit in the same place, separate them slightly.
- Even a tiny offset like 0.001 units can stop the flicker. You can offset along any axis (X,Y, or Z) as long as they are not co-planar anymore.
- On weaker devices (mobile or VR for example) heavy scenes and poor performance can make Z-fighting appear even when objects are a bit separated. Reducing load and optimizing rendering can help avoid precision issues. Making lighter scenes can produce more stable depth results.
- If you are developing a 2D game and want one specific object to always be on top you can also adjust the sort order of the object that should appear in front.
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