If you are suffering from bugs like this...

... then check your driver settings:


Start by opening the "Radeon Software" control panel. You should find it either in your tray or in your start menu in the folder "AMD Radeon Software".

• Select the "Gaming" tab, category "Games"
  
• Select "Horizon Zero Dawn" from the list of games
  
• Scroll down untill you see "Advanced" and click to open
  
• For "Texture Filtering Quality" you must select "Standard".
  "Surface Format Optimization" needs to be "Disabled"
  
• Ingame choose a resolution of at most 1920x1080. Anything above still won't work, but at least you get FHD quality working.
  
• Restart the game, and enjoy!

All other options are safe to tune as you like, only these two must not be tempered with for this game.

Hopefully an upcoming hotfix for the game will make it compatible with these options, but until then you now know what to do.

(For the tech-savy, what happened is that the engine used a texture sampling API for reading from a raw buffer somewhere in the LOD system. Something you should not do (there are different APIs for raw buffer access), and which breaks inevitably if the driver applies any form of optimization to texture sampling. The necessary fix is for the game to use the correct API in that spot.)