Z Fighting

[Doug Park]

The downside is if you need to see things closer than 300" from your camera.

The basic idea with the Z buffer is that the scene is sliced into very thin segments starting at the front clipping plane and ending at the back clipping plane. The number of slices is fixed so if two surfaces happen to hit in the same slice you get Z fighting.

By moving the front clipping plane further away from the camera the slices are thinner reducing the probability of two surfaces being in the same slice.