I've made some particular observations (back and forth looking at the lifts, yet again) and the game actually has more level of detail models than is useful. In that particular case, it turns out all of the lower detail models are bad, too; they just have fewer polygons, never mind preserving contrast edges. So we have visual edges turning into zigzags, first in the claspy bits, then the lights, and the entire walls. The thing should have had a low detail model with a tesselation shader to reproduce the cylindrical shape as needed. It's a rush job. Regarding ground textures, those should mostly be procedural, not giant blocks of image, perhaps using something like a sparsely mapped mipmap with fallback to lower detail. Well, the fallback works (unlike the planets blinking out to black, but that was just patched), but the demand estimation doesn't, and it's evicting what we need in favour of something else.
