anything around smoke or fire is distorted, does anyone know why or how i can change it?

I have the same issue.. all the darkness, fire etc have a pixelation effect.

I hear from people it came from an update of my graphics driver, but it only showed up when On Alert arrived. It was only on PTS before on alert (not on live). So therefore i KNOW it's not my graphics driver.

is there anyway to fix it?

I posted a bug report long ago.. and the response was "check your driver".. lmao.

Something changed in the On Alert patch graphics wise ..

Do you have "Soft Particles" turned on? That might not be the exact name of the option, but it's something like that.

That's the only thing I can think of.

Yes that option is turned on. Should it be on or off.

Something I can think of. I have noticed with my graphics card that anti-aliasing hasn't worked correctly for my graphics card for some time. I get a nasty square distortion around fires and other effects. However, the game runs fine and looks fine as long as I have anti-aliasing turned off.

Try turning off your anti-aliasing function from the in-game graphics options and see what happens. You'll have to open the advanced preferences to find it.