2d Top Down Camera Movement Causes Tiles and Other Sprites to Blur\Ghost\Jitter

Summary

I just got started developing with Unity about a month ago. I worked through seveal tutorials and then decided to dive in on my own with a 2d top-down shooter as an example project. Things were going really well until I started noticing that when my camera follows the player game object, everything other than the player blurs\ghosts\jitters. When the camera is not moving everything looks great.

Please see the Example Video to see this in action. The video makes it look a little more subtle, but I feel its still pretty visible. Cranking the quality up to 1080 helps. All of the other details and things I have tried already are documented in the sections below.

Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong? I am not even 100% sure the camera is the root cause, but it seemed like the most obvious place to start looking.

Thank you in advance for your time and input...I have spent days trying to figure this out and have started to run out of ideas. Also, let me know if there is anything additional that would be helpful in understanding the problem further.

Camera Controller Script

Note: This script is attached to the camera game object.

 using System.Collections;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using UnityEngine;

 public class CameraController : MonoBehaviour 
 {
     public GameObject followTarget;

     private Camera attachedCamera;

     public float DefaultOrthographicSize
     {
         get
         {
             return (Screen.height / RenderingConfiguration.PixelsToUnits) / 2;
         }
     }

     void Awake()
     {
         attachedCamera = GetComponent<Camera>();
         attachedCamera.orthographicSize = DefaultOrthographicSize;
     }

     void LateUpdate () 
     {
         if (!followTarget)
             return;

         FollowTarget();
     }

     private void FollowTarget()
     {
         var roundedTargetX = RoundToNearestPixel(followTarget.transform.position.x);
         var roundedTargetY = RoundToNearestPixel(followTarget.transform.position.y);
         var targetPos = new Vector3 (roundedTargetX, roundedTargetY, transform.position.z);
         
         transform.position = targetPos;
     }

     private float RoundToNearestPixel(float unityUnits)  
     {
         // Based on this post https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/solved-2d-sprites-flicker-shake-on-camera-movement.270741/
         var valueInPixels = unityUnits * RenderingConfiguration.PixelsToUnits;
         valueInPixels = Mathf.Round(valueInPixels);
         var roundedUnityUnits = valueInPixels * (1 / RenderingConfiguration.PixelsToUnits);
         return roundedUnityUnits;
     }
 }

Project Setup

General

• Unity 5.6.1

• Camera Settings

• Quality Settings

• Sprite size: 64px

• Pixel Per Unit: 64px

• Sprites Rendering:

  • Uses material that has pixelsnap enabled.

  • Filtering = point

  • Mip maps are disabled

• Test level was created using Tiled and then exported to Unity using Tiled2Unity.

  • unity:scale = 1

  • Pixels Per unit = 64px

Hardware

The monitor that I am testing on isn't anything special, but it runs at 60hz and I use it for gaming and do not have issues. I have tested other top down 2d games in my steam library on the monitor, such as Moon Hunters, and do not see anything like this issue.

Things that I have tried

Test Setup

• Running the game in full screen, standalone exe outside the editor, different resolutions, and aspect ratios.

• Another monitor

Sprites and Tiles

• Creating a material with pixel snap and making all sprite renders use this instead of the default sprite material.

• Disabling compression of sprites.

• Creating a test level using a few tiled sprites instead of the Tiled2Unity export.

• Using point instead of bilinear filtering

• Using stock sprites instead of the ones I created. For example, http://kenney.nl/assets/topdown-shooter.

Camera Controller Script

• Dampening camera movement using Vector3.Lerp and Vector3.SmoothDamp. This actually worsened the situation and I saw some weirdness where the camera's transform position kept fidgeting after the player stopped moving.

• Setting orthographic size and rounding camera movement position to nearest pixel as suggested by Shadeless in the post 2D sprites flicker/shake on camera movement and Efficient Tile Map for Platformer

• Using\modifying existing examples or cameras

  • PixelPerfectCamera

  • Unity 2d Standard Assets

  • Camera from this post

  • Camera from Unity UFO tutorial

Quality Settings

• Experimenting with all Vsync options

Additional Related Research

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1373273/camera-movement-causes-2d-sprites-to-shakeglitchji.html

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1122629/2d-camera-movement-causes-flickeringjittering-spri.html

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/615493/how-to-smoothly-move-a-2d-camera-without-ghosting.html

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/2d-camera-ghosting.239013/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity2D/comments/4stgm2/pixelperfect_2d_rendering_in_unity_explained/