Each ground texture used to be one photo laid edge to edge the same way across the world, so from a few meters to about 60 m out you could see the same blotches in rows. The ground is now cut into cells about 2 m across (1 m on bare rock), and each cell shows its own part of the photo, turned and sized a little differently. On steep rock the grain still runs downhill, and the cost in frame time was within noise.
The long straight streaks on the near slab are tree shadows and grain seen at a low angle, not repeats.
