I suppose the (maybe) obvious question is: are your graphics card drivers up to date?

Try turning the lighting quality down one step. I had a similar problem with the new version because it has a newly implemented highest setting for lighting quality. Lowering it to High instead of Highest (or whatever they're called) solved everything.

Yes, drivers are up to date, and while checking this the problem somehow seems to have fixed itself - to some degree.

I have two user accounts on this laptop (Windows 7 64bit): one admin account, which I never use, and one non-admin account. When I run this game within the admin account it works for some reason. But when I run it within the other account "as admin" it doesn't... Also, when I run it as admin the graphics setting for Mesh Quality is set to "custom" (see screenshot), an option that isn't actually selectable.

Lowering the lightning quality didn't change anything.

I will look into this again tomorrow, as the switching between accounts is quite tiresome. Will keep you posted.

I still have not found the exact cause of this issue, but running the game on another user account (I created a new non-admin one) seems to fix it, so it must have something to do with some yet unknown settings within my main account. But as the game is now playable, I won't look any further into this. So consider this solved.