Low-Quality Textures

Try reinstalling?
Adjust the settings?

I've adjusted graphic and video settings, and nothing seems to help. I'll try reinstalling.

I've come to the conclusion that it must be my internet causing it. Case closed, I guess.

@cooks-iii
Here are a few things you can try to offset the load on your CPU/GPU:

• Turn off any unnecessary Background Apps in Windows

• Set your monitor's refresh rate in Sea of Thieves settings to match your monitor's actual refresh rate instead of running uncapped (or 299 FPS)

• Set textures to Legendary in the settings menu to reduce pop-in

• Verify Sea of Thieves by running integrity check to eliminate possibility of corrupted game files

• Manage 3D settings in NVidia Control Panel to emphasize performance over quality and select high performance power mode. There are a lot of guides on how to setup game profiles for performance that focus on high performance texture filtering and optimization.

• Ensure that you have proper cooling on your CPU and GPU. While running Sea of Thieves, a 2080 should render 299 FPS at ~65°C and average temperatures for an i7/i9 overclocked at 4.8 - 5.1 GHz should have all cores at 55° C under load with maximum temperatures no higher than 70° C.

If none of the above mentioned items help to improve your rendering performance, then you can try clearing your %localappdata% for Athena. Although I have not tried deleting and/or renaming local data for Sea of Thieves, this method works for other games using the UE4 engine. Initially, instead of deleting the Athena folder, just rename it to Athena1 and launch the game and see if your user setting are reset back to default. This is important because the gamesettings.ini can become corrupt and changes will not reflect client side. Here is an example of the .ini:

[/Game/Blueprints/Audio/BP_GameNarrationCoordinator.BP_GameNarrationCoordinator_C]
CachedPreferredVoice=Microsoft Pavel
CachedLanguage=ru-RU
CachedGender=0

[ScalabilityGroups]
sg.ResolutionQuality=100
sg.ViewDistanceQuality=3
sg.AntiAliasingQuality=3
sg.ShadowQuality=3
sg.PostProcessQuality=3
sg.TextureQuality=3
sg.EffectsQuality=3

[/Script/Athena.AthenaGameUserSettings]
MaxVerticalResolution=0
MaxFPS=0
VSync=0
LightingDetail=0
ModelDetail=4
ShadowDetail=0
TextureDetail=0
WaterDetail=0
AnimationQuality=0
ResolutionScaling=100.000000
ParticleEmitterQuality=0
ParticleResolutionQuality=0
BackBufferCount=2
ShowPerformanceCounters=3
SmoothFPS=True
HDR=True
Fullscreen=True
bUseVSync=False
ResolutionSizeX=0
ResolutionSizeY=0
LastUserConfirmedResolutionSizeX=0
LastUserConfirmedResolutionSizeY=0
WindowPosX=-1
WindowPosY=-1
bUseDesktopResolutionForFullscreen=False
FullscreenMode=2
LastConfirmedFullscreenMode=2
Version=5
AudioQualityLevel=0
MMCThresholdScale=0
AudioOutputSpatialAudio=False