Vanguard got a magical performance boost? Have I wandered into Bizarro World?

With the latest Vanguard patch, there's an ini setting you'll definitely want to tweak.

For the time being, some players may need to edit their VgClient.ini and set bEfficientTextures to True. If that line doesn't exist, you may add it to the bottom of the [General] section. Just copy and paste: "bUseEfficientTextures=True" . If you don't make the setting true in your vgclient.ini, nothing drastic will happen - you just won't see some of the performance boost until game update #2.

Go get all the details from the Vanguard forums.