Thank you. They are not locators, but they are all exactly the same shape, and suspiciously remind me of a texture filter for some sort of lighting effect. So, I sifted through a bunch of textures used in the game for lighting, lightning, fire, etc. effects and found that those are "stars" as in astronomy; they are sometimes "tinted" various colors in the night sky, but they are obviously also supposed to be very small. So, now the question remains, why are some of yours so big and so close? Because I don't get this effect at all and have never seen it, I'm also wondering if perhaps the "shader" techniques used are somehow handled differently on your GeForce card. Anyway, at least we know what they are. I will continue to investigate what it might be and how to resolve...at the very worst, you may just have to disable the stars. I'll keep you posted...
I don't know if this will help or not, but I made a couple changes to try. The stars are rendered with what DirectX calls a "point list." This point list has a point size, minimum point size and a maximum point size defined for it. The code set the point size and the minimum point size, but did not define a maximum. So I set the maximum. I also tried setting the "z order" as well. Download the latest Maelstrom and see if that changes anything for you.