I don’t know what happened or how to fix it, but my graphics quality dropped really far to where
images that are normally smooth gradients are now large lines. Basically, it has made the graphics
look blocky and really low rez.
It is puzzling that the graphics, as they show in the editor / scene window, are blocky and not just
when they game is built and ran.
Go to edit > project settings > quality, most likely your issue lies in there if not, go to edit > project settings > player, change the display resolution dialog to enabled, when your game launches make sure all the settings are in order and if that does not work, you have a piece of code that changes the graphics settings that looks too see if you are running it in the editor. Most likely that would be due too a 3rd party API misbehaving
Thank you.
I checked the display rez dialogue and everything seemed correct there.
The thing about this is that the graphics anomaly is in the editor window,
so I don’t know that the quality settings will affect that. I can’t imagine
any 3rd party thing that could have done it although I suspect that my
NGUI atlas may have been corrupted or something. That’s all I can
think of at this time.
I still can’t figure out why it is doing this.
I can include screen shots if that will help anyone help me. 
Like lividrabbit wrote, you have probably lowered the quality in the editor. Just like in builds you can change quality shown in editor. Project settings → quality.
Ya, I quadruple checked those settings and I think everything is in place.
Here is a screen shot of the settings with the gradient anomaly in the scene window.
Is it just that one texture or is it all textures?
If it’s just that one texture perhaps the filter mode has been changed to point? If that’s the case it needs to be Bilinear or Trilinear for smooth gradients.
That was it sir, thank you very much.
The atlas texture had changed to ‘point’ somehow.
Thanks everyone for your help and advice.
