Recently I have noticed that only my own character gets consistently rendered in with high detail textures. All the other player characters and NPCs in the world are first rendered at low quality, and get then upgraded to medium quality textures when I get closer. I'm not talking about the normal LOD process here, as this happens when I should already be seeing the high quality textures.

When I log into the game and have a few characters around me chances are that they are rendered for a split second with high quality textures, but then switch back to low or medium quality. When I start a conversation with an NPC the high quality texture for the NPC is displayed, but outside the conversation the NPC is again rendered with medium (sometimes low) quality textures.

I took a few snaps standing next to Queen Ayrenn in Greenshade.

Queen Ayrenn as she is displayed in world:


Queen Ayrenn, shortly after having initiated a conversation (textures have switched to high quality):


Queen Ayrenn during conversation (textures still at high quality):


I have tried switching my user settings file to a vanilla one, which didn't help and I have tried running the game without add-ons, which also didn't help. If I remember correctly, the Mac client did have a problem displaying the NPCs during conversations with high quality textures during beta/early release, but this LOD problem is something I only have noticed recently.

I don't know if that is a known issue, just throwing it out, since I want my ESO to look as good as possible


Mac Specs:
Mac Pro Late 2013, Quad Xeon E5 3.7GHz, Dual AMD D300, 12 GB DDR3 RAM, OSX 10.9.5


EDIT: Found an old screenshot from 04/19/2014 with a ton of player characters that are all rendered in high quality detail, which supports my feeling that this is an issue that the Mac client didn't have shortly after release: