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ArmA 3 and Z-fighting

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So,i'm sure anyone reading this who has ever played the role of a bush wookie,or spotter before,will be quite familiar with this thing called Z-fighting.

Its the flickering of distant objects that makes it seem your textures are over lapping/spazzing out,or to sum it up scientifically :

 

"Z-fighting, also called stitching, is a phenomenon in 3D rendering that occurs when two or more primitives have similar or identical values in the z-buffer. It is particularly prevalent with coplanar polygons, where two faces occupy essentially the same space, with neither in front. 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 a flickering, noisy rasterization of two polygons which "fight" to color the screen pixels. This problem is usually caused by limited sub-pixel precision and floating point and fixed point round-off errors."

 

This video shows it in all its ugly glory...

 

Z-fighting can occur in any game with a med/high-long view distance.Skyrim is notorious for it for one example.

 

In recent Arma 3 updates this became alot worse for me in particular,even though performance of Arma3 became alot better and more consistent.

I noticed that Z fighting can occur at as little range as 400 meters away when looking through optics or a rangefinder. 

 

I want to ask if anyone has any tips on reducing Z fighting. Also what their personal experience with it is as to when is it most apparent for them.

I will list some things i found by testing myself these days which reduce it...some of which are very situational however...

 

1.Lower ATOC setting...

for some reason,when standing next to a bush,or tree and looking through a scope,Z fighting appears at long AND medium range on all objects.(400 meters is medium)

Disable ATOC on grass/trees can have a positive effect.

 

 

2.Standing up....

yes,simply standing up will remove z-fighting if you were prone a moment ago and experienced it.strange as this is applicable wether laying in grass OR tarmac.

 

3.Change view distance temporarily

If looking at say a city,800 meters away and you experience Z-fighting,simply open up view settings and set it to double or triple what it was,unpause and zoom as far as you can,then un zoom and look again at the 800 meter range city,this can sometimes remove Z-fighting in that scene.Then simply revert view distance.

 

4.Object detail....

Increasing object detail to very high or above seems to help.

 

If anyone has any experience with combating Z fighting please do tell.This is an issue with many games,unfortunately for me at least became worse in Arma3 recently and i would love more info to fix it.

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Sure. No need for optics. Just paradrop above Tanoa main airfield at 2000 m. The ground rendering is just ugly (3rd person view) due to that flickering/Z figthing!

I have the max settings possible: ultra

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Yup, skydiving is just atrocious!

It's a real immersion breaker. Thanks for the tips. I could of sworn I changed the view distance once and back and it fixed it. I'll have to try it again.

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On 9.10.2018 at 2:16 PM, Von Quest said:

Yup, skydiving is just atrocious!

It's a real immersion breaker. Thanks for the tips. I could of sworn I changed the view distance once and back and it fixed it. I'll have to try it again.

If you play in first person it's not that bad. 

That's because there no objects near AND far from the camera. That also applies to every z-fighting situation.

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