Hmm... well, you might be suffering from the same bug as is described in these two topics:
Link 1 Link 2 It doesn't seem to be exactly the same as in my case, however, as I don't get the actual texture pop-ins as much as the textures change into their full quality only when I'm really close by (animations and such don't activate). If you could go into my topic again (the first link) and check out the video examples (there are no spoilers), and maybe you could say if it looks familiar to you.
Just to make sure, what values have you set for
FoliageDistanceScale and
MeshDistanceScale, in the user.ini? Or are you running it on default values? If so, what profile have you set? I know you've already mentioned you tried to adjust the settings in that file, but some specifics might help. Lastly, what graphics card do you you have, and which driver version?
I don't doubt you have the bug (or one related to it), but for the sake of argument we might keep it going. I'll copy/paste the response I received from tech support, as well, just so you can see that they've at least acknowledged that there's a problem. A seemingly
rare problem, but still.
"We thank you for all the work you put into the investigation of this issue. We are actually aware of this and this is a feature aiming at saving some memory in this graphics-intensive game. The feature usually works in such a way that this issue is imperceptible to most. It happens at the peripheries of the screen and should not be visible in the immediate closeness of Geralt's. So you'd have to purposefully make effort to switch your attention to the edges of the screen to observe the LOD increase. But in your case this happens very close to Geralt, even right in front of him apparently and I do not know why this happens so with your graphics card. It is not an issue we encounter often."