For those of you who have this issue are you making changes to the DiffusePower by any chance ? If I take another output from my diffuse texture sample and connect it to DiffusePower it recreates the problem a little and if I take the B channel output from the diffuse texture sample it's covered in white spots. I am not…
now I am almost convinced that it's the levels in the diffuse map. below is the blue channel from the texture in the first 2 pics only here it's not tiled
It's absolutely a normal map issue. Diffuse Power is only enhancing the effect. Yes depends on the texture, I guess it's less of a problem for flat normal maps. You can however use sharpened MipMaps (Texture Properties -> Mip Gen Settings -> Sharpen10) to exaggerate artifacts for testing purposes.