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 that's because they calculate the 3d images from eagle eye views where street view isn't available. (Works in my city, the buildings look not *that* bad)