Ever since Saturday's 2.6.9 patch the game has become basically unplayable for me because of stuttering and lag. It's hard to move without having chopping, freezing and/or stuttering frames, whereas before it was smooth and I only sometimes experienced input lag where the keyboard and mouse would freeze for few seconds and then unfreeze.

Also despite having officially quicker texture loading times, they take instead much more longer than before. Before the update, usually only the NPC and other player characters models needed about 3 seconds to load the high quality texture (and in some cases they already were loaded up when you approached them), now it takes double the time. And many overland/outside the city and city textures that were high resolution without loading or took 2-3 seconds maximum to load take instead a long time, so the city and outside look worse. And in some cases, like the ground and grass never load and stay in low resolution all the time. Also everything seems much more jagged, and the outlines sharp and pointy, contrasting with things around them, before they were crisp and blended naturally.

Also NPC textures now load only from the front, so if you go around them and look at their back, it takes additonal 3-5 seconds to load their back. And worse yet, if you look away from various NPCs like the banker at Davon's Watch using the mouselook in 1st or 3rd person, and then look back at them, they are back to the low/minimal quality resolution texture! So turning away from them for even 2 seconds makes them revert to the minimal quality texture.

Models themselves also take longer time to load and appear, whether it's NPCs, crafting stations and their items or other players, who appear as black shadows first way more often.

Here's an example: It took me 14 seconds for the right pillar to load the high resolution texture (I was counting it, since it happens every time I appraoch the stairs now), and additional 5-8 seconds to load the high res texture of the left pillar. Before the patch they always had the high resolution textures and I've played the game every day since Nov 1.

Below is an additional example of how outside of DA and outside of the Ash mountain looks now, with game on medium settings but with high resolution textures selected, and the last picture is from before the patch, the one from Davon's Watch with the sun shining and the fountai with purple flower trees to the left, with exactly the same settings. You can see the difference. According to chat and guild mates I'm not the only one with worse textures and lag introduced by the patch.

If you're experiencing same or similar problems, please post so that ZOS is more likely to investigate this issue.