Z-fighting

Z-fighting, also called stitching or planefighting, is a phenomenon in 3D rendering that occurs when two or more primitives have very similar distances to the camera.

With large virtual environments inevitably there is an inherent conflict between the need to resolve visibility in the distance and in the foreground, so for example in a space flight simulator, if a distant galaxy is drawn to scale, the viewer will not have the precision to resolve visibility on any cockpit geometry in the foreground (although even a numerical representation would present problems prior to z-buffered rendering).

To mitigate these problems, z-buffer precision is weighted towards the near clip plane, but this is not the case with all visibility schemes and it is insufficient to eliminate all z-fighting issues.

Z-fighting that is caused by insufficient precision in the depth buffer can be resolved by simply reducing the visible distance in the world.

This technique is seen in the game Grand Theft Auto V. Due to the way they are encoded, floating-point numbers have much more precision when closer to 0.