I'm with Citabria on this. Perhaps the new textures work well on *some* systems. However, I have a feeling they do not work well on most, therefore it would seem prudent to take a step back and return to the level of playability that existed prior to the update, by reverting back to those textures (whilst leaving the other, non-problematic improvements in place).
In the future it would be smart to test major updates such as this on a variety of hardware--both old and new--before pressing such updates into service. I doubt that 90% of AHers have same or better hardware than the beta-testers have. Always run tests on both state-of-the-art *and* mediocre (or average) systems, and make the latter the lowest common denominator for establishing acceptable performance, be it frame rate or display quality.