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I played Farmville 2 on a Samsung Note 2. I noticed a clear grid on every alpha lights. That does not happen on an iPad Retina though.

I wonder what is the reason of this. Is it due to the GPU, or is it done by the developer to save device performance? Can anyone explain it?

If it is for the optimization, I would like to study it to apply into my game as well. I make my game in Unity 3D. Please shed the light on me!

Thanks you all! Quang

Screenshot taken directly from a Samsung Note 2, compressed a bit by the image host. Hope you still see the grid.

Quang Nguyen
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I'll avoid speculating as to why this is done on one machine vs. another, but that really looks like stippling/screen-door transparency, and it's common in cases where transparency is too expensive or in places that use a shading/lighting approach (ex: deferred) where there's insufficient information to do it effectively.

Transparency can be very expensive because of the need to sort fragments by depth. There are techniques like dual-depth peeling to achieve it accurately at a per-fragment level but it is still quite expensive.

Screen-door transparency eliminates the depth-sorting requirement by using only completely opaque colors and no blending (but with gaps in between the pixels to simulate the look of something transparent), and that can significantly help in some cases.

  • Thank you very much! Now I can use your keywords to research further. If you know how to apply it in Unity, please show me how! – Quang Nguyen Nov 18 '15 at 07:41