turns out having "use vbos" enabled in the video settings causes some gorgeous graphical glitches to appear. reminds me a lot of how google earth looks when you get down to street level.
RE google earth street level appearance, this is what i mean. trees are turned into meaningless geometry. all the buildings are off model, the cars are melted lumps in the road. its so beautifully broken
@puppy Wanted to add: This really looks like a (bad) very early 3D video game. Image the hardware makes (a lot of) floating point errors on the geometry and of course the textures are low resolution