how to stop real time shadows in Unity5 from blinking flickering and fritzing

We are building a flying simulation with a large multi-kilometer city model. simple shader : standard opaque. simple lighting : single directional light and skybox.

The buildings are exhibiting what looks like z-fighting errors with what appear to be the real-time shadows on them. souped up system, Intel i5 / 16gb ram / Radeon 7990 6gb gpu. Windows 7, DirectX 11.

The screenshots below were taken from a stationery vantage point as the buildings flickered.

does anyone know how to fix this?


We solved it.
We had clipping planes on the camera between 0.1 near and 10000 far.
We had this because the flyer sits on the back of a robot and we want them to see both the robot and distant terrain.
The terrain + asset set is quite large, about a 10k x 10k swath of land, sea, and buildings.

turns out this extreme focal range messes with most GPUs capabilities.

A simple modification of the camera’s near clipping plane from 0.1m to 0.4m completely solved this problem.

Here’s where we found the hints:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/terrain-flickering-really-annoying-please-help.164936/

I know this is an old thread but it’s high up when searching for this problem so am adding some info that helped me:

Setting the near clipping plane to 0.4m also solved this for me, except that it’s not a good solution for me as it allows a first person camera to see through walls, clip the top of arms moving infront of the camera etc.

What worked for me was my changing some settings on my directional light’s shadow settings. By increasing the Bias from the default 0.05 to 0.5 I was able to retain the camera’s near clipping plane at 0.1 and also prevent the flickering. I think the shadows were effectively shadowing themselves, so it created the flickering. Increasing the bias pushes the shadows away from the source, preventing self shadowing.

Before you do anything anyone else suggested, try changing the Shadow Projection (Under quality settings, do it for every quality level) from close fit to stable fit. It completely fixed the issue for me, while other suggestions merely decreased the rate at which shadows flicker @gregroberts

I solve my problem just bringing back my gameobject (player) close to word origin (0,0,0). I’m using a huge map (70 Km x 70 Km). Far away from origin, the problem appear. Using near clipping planes solve the problem too, but only at values bigger than 7 (that is not good for my project).