Can anyone explain exactly what the issue is with the railroad track screenshots in the OP? I'm not trying to suggest that the issues aren't real, just having trouble understanding what difference those shots are representing.
It's hard to see in the static screenshot, but before the patch they were using parallax occlusion mapping to give depth to the texture. If you were to walk around you would see the illusion that the cross beams and the pebbles actually have depth and proper perspective based on the angle you are viewing them. Here are some examples of the effect:
After the patch the parallax mapping was removed so it is just a flat texture.
If you look around where the picture says "PARALLAX OCCLUSION", before the patch you can see the cross bars look like they are actually sitting in the rocks properly based on the perspective the camera is looking at them. After the patch, the perspective looks completely off for this angle, it's just a flat texture on a flat plane, and the "perspective" of the texture looks as if you should be standing on the other side looking towards where the camera is.
This is disappointing since GTAV's use of POM on the next gen versions was a somewhat big deal. It's still a new effect to consoles, and most games don't use it. So to see fairly widespread use of it in a gigantic open world game with good performance was actually quite impressive and unexpected, and represented a significant improvement over the last gen versions of the game, as well as being a nice visual benefit for the new first person mode. It was actually one of the effects that got me to buy the PS4 version despite having played the hell out of and beaten the game on PS3. It demonstrated to me that the next gen version was more than just simply a higher resolution port.