Z-fighting

thumb|Demonstration of z-fighting with multiple colors and textures over a grey background

Z-fighting, also called stitching or planefighting, is a phenomenon in 3D rendering that occurs when two or more primitives have very similar distance to the camera. This would cause them to have near-similar or identical values in the z-buffer, which keeps track of depth. This then means that when a specific pixel is being rendered, it is ambiguous which one of the two primitives are drawn in that pixel because the z-buffer cannot distinguish precisely which one is farther from the other. If one pixel was unambiguously closer, the less close one could be discarded. It is particularly prevalent with coplanar polygons, where two faces occupy essentially the same space, with neither in front. As a result, affected pixels are rendered with fragments from one polygon or the other arbitrarily, in a manner determined by the precision of the z-buffer. It can also vary as the scene or camera is changed, causing one polygon to "win" the z test, then another, and so on. The overall effect is flickering, noisy rasterization of two polygons which "fight" to color the screen pixels. This problem is usually caused by limited sub-pixel precision, floating point and fixed point round-off errors.