It seems to me the graphics quality is higher than my settings before allowed for, and others have agreed, "yeah the graphics got a huge boost." The problem for me is that my computer can't run it. I don't have a great computer for gaming, but I've been able to get by pretty well using high texture quality, and everything else at minimum or off except for view distance of 50 and bloom and grass on. Subsampling quality at low makes my game run quite smooth, medium subsampling is just usable, high is very jittery. Looking at old screenshots I find varied FPS up to 23 while in dungeons.
But after the patch I'm only at 9 FPS in most places, up to 15 FPS in unpopulated areas like my apartment. Worse yet all the graphics take several seconds to load, so moving fast means playing on unloaded terrain and fighting invisible monsters (and cities are even worse, taking minutes to fully load buildings and people). Setting my visuals to complete minimum gets me between 11 and 15 FPS, and smooth enough to play except with the ugly texture quality I still have problems with enemies not displaying and surrounding areas not loading fully, sometimes even after half a minute of fighting.
I don't see anything in the latest patch notes about graphics updates and I haven't read anything about new requirements, so what's going on?