No Man’s Sky PC launch issues being worked on

No Man’s Sky launched for PC on Friday and was almost immediately being criticised by fans for a number of performance problems either hampering the experience or making it completely unplayable.

Since then developer Hello Games has been working around the clock to not only suggest workarounds and available fixes, but also implement a number of fixes as part of an experimental build of the game.

Known Issues and Workarounds

Framerate stutters during play

We are tracking a problem with the graphics card shader cache, causing shaders to be built during gameplay. We have a workaround we are testing, which will use our own caching mechanism.

In the meantime, playing the game you will notice these stutters become far less frequent over time.

Alt-tab

If you alt-tab out of the game while it’s in fullscreen mode, you aren’t able to bring it back up. We’re testing a fix for this, but if you have the game in borderless mode, alt-tabbing works like normal.

Alternatively going to NMS in task manager and doing ‘bring to front’ works

Finally you can press the Play button on the Steam interface. It brings the window back.

Framerate limiter

On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 gives sub-60 FPS. Bumping to 90 FPS or above resolves this issue. A fix is in progress.

Sound crackling

Others have reported going to windows sound options and lowering the audio quality to DVD quality will resolve this. We are investigating this.

Large Frame Drops, Texture Flickering

We are working on a fix, in the meantime try disabling Steam Overlay. Go into the properties of the game in your steam client. Under the General tab uncheck the Enable Steam Overlay option.

Please also mail [email protected] and provide as much info as possible on this. We are working with Steam to reproduce the issue.

If you are having problems launching due to graphics settings

Your monitor settings have been incorrectly detected. Please go to your Steamapps/common/No Man’s Sky/Binaries/SETTINGS/TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS from there you can either set “Fullscreen” to “false” or more appropriately, just put your proper resolution in and it should launch.

In here you can also experiment with graphical settings pre-launch, if you believe your settings are preventing you from launching

Crash to desktop after Initialise white screen

This is often caused by running on Intel GPUs, which are not currently supported.

If you have an NVidia or AMD driver, please ensure you have latest drivers and your card supports OpenGL 4.5. Until NVidia and AMD update drivers NMS might accidentally select the embedded/weak/low-power GPU. If you have more than one GPU make sure set NMS.exe to High Performance in their respective GPU management programs.

In particular, getting a Title Screen with just a black background and the words “No Man’s Sky” followed by a crash is normally an indication of not meeting GPU and OpenGL 4.5 requirements. Make sure drivers are up to date, and that your machine is above min spec.

Mouse Jittering

We are tracking a problem where with certain CPU/GPU configs the mouse movement jitters (can look like frame out). We are testing a fix for this.

Occasional Large Frame Drop

We are seeing players suffer large frameout when their GFX card runs out of memory, and begins to evict to the CPU RAM. This can happen if you have a lower amount of GPU memory, or if you are running at a high resolution. Try lowering your texture quality or resolution to avoid this.

Many issues have already been resolved, with an updated “experimental” version of the game available by right-clicking on the game from the library page and select “Properties”. Among the available tabs will be the “BETAS” tab. The “3xperimental” game brand should be listed in the dropdown menu under “Select the beta you would like to opt into:”

Experimental build fixes

Improved AMD Phenom Support

Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten overnight to support AMD CPUs. Unfortunately whilst the game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2, Havok Physics still requires “Supplemental SSE 3”, which was not supported until “Bobcat” and above. We’re discussing with Havok.

Alt-Tab has improved

Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved.

Shader Caching

Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on (this will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards

Mouse Jitter

Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in “Mouse Smoothing”.

Max FPS Cap

On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been improved.

Improved Performance

On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.

Intel GPUs

The game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high end GPU has not been selected.

Gsync

Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users

A public update is set to go live early this week.

Source: Steam