We're working towards an update for our Gear VR game and it's been a while since we've pushed an update. We're seeing a change in the final render of the game where the amount of dithering (or noise, or grain, or moire pattern depending on how you describe it) has been substantially reduced/removed. This however, makes the banding in our dark scenes much more apparent. The dithering effect is actually desirable, but we can't figure out where it was coming from or how to get it back.
Here's a comparison to show you what I mean. Dithering is present on the left (our current build on the store) but is not present using the latest Unity/Mobile SDK/Utilities:
Both shots are taken on the same Galaxy S6, using Power + Home to take a screenshot. We're in gamma space with 32-bit display buffers disabled. Changing display buffers doesn't seem to make a difference (and changing to linear space isn't really feasible at this stage).
Does anybody know of anything that may have changed with either the mobile SDK or Unity in the past, say, 6 months that may have removed the dithering? Thanks!
We've continued to look into what had changed since our last build of the game and determined that the "Use 32-bit Display Buffer" option is no longer respected for Gear VR builds as of Unity 5.4. More details on this problem are in this discussion.