No Man’s Sky – PC Performance Tweaks and Tips

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Early reports about the No Man’s Sky PC port suggest it’s a bit bobbins. Steam review bombs are going off left and right, and performance tests look like they’re all over the place. There are a few things you can do to smooth out the frame-rate and potentially avoid some of the worst issues, however. Read on for a selection of early tweaks to get No Man’s Sky running slightly better.

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If none of these do the business for you, then your only choices are really to wait for further patches or seek out a Steam refund.

Help, I’m stuck on this ‘Initialise’ screen.

Press E (or the corresponding gamepad button, probably X). It’s a button prompt. Just not an especially obvious one.

Oh my god, the No Man’s Sky frame-rate is stuttering horribly.

Yes, unfortunately it sounds like it does that. I don’t think you’ll be able to eliminate that entirely, but following these steps could make it a bit better.

Head to the Graphics Options menu and disable the in-game V-Sync. Also note that the frame-rate is probably set to be capped at 30fps by default, so change that to Max. Be aware that to make changes to the Graphics Settings, you have to hold down the mouse button more than usual to confirm choices.

Also worth trying as it’s worked for some. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man’s Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS (or wherever you installed it). Find and open TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.MXML then find the GSync option and change it false.

It’s necessary to restart the game entirely to make graphics changes ‘stick’, so just quit out for now. If you have an Nvidia card, open up the Nvidia control panel and force Adaptive V-Sync through there. AMD has a forced V-Sync option in the Crimson settings too, but as an AMD GPU user myself I prefer RivaTuner Statistics Server for this sort of situation (I use it for The Witcher 3 in particular).

Open up RTSS (it might complain about not being able to reach a server, don’t worry about that), associate it with the No Man’s Sky, and set the frame-rate limit in that profile to an appropriate number (most likely 60, but it obviously depends what your monitor and PC are capable of).

While you’re messing with your Nvidia/AMD settings, may as well go ahead and override the in-game Anisotropic Filtering too (because it’s a bit rubbish). Set it to a forced x16, or whatever your PC can handle.

Can I push the FOV beyond the max of 100?

Yes you can. Thanks to a post from the Canard PC Forums, here’s how to do that.

Find “\No Man’s Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS\TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.MXML” and open it up (the post doesn’t mention how, but Notepad is usually the answer in these cases). Keep a backup copy first if you’re nervous about making changes.

Find “<Property name=”FoVOnFoot” value=”100.000000″ /> and <Property name=”FoVInShip” value=”100.000000″ /> in the document, and change those values to something higher (140.000000, for example). Save, then load the game back up again. You should now have an increased FOV. This is obviously adjusted at your own risk, it’s outside the default values so may cause some additional visual oddities.

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No Man’s Sky is crashing constantly on my PC, help.

There seems to be a lot of that going about as well, sadly. Again, these suggestions probably won’t clear up all of the crashing issues, but may help.

First of all, a small (18mb) patch containing Visual C++ stuff has been pushed out on Steam. That should solve any crashing problems caused by players not having those files. Try restarting Steam to make sure its been downloaded and applied.

Second, and I know this is super obvious, but it sometimes needs saying: get the latest GPU drivers for your Nvidia or AMD card. Your GPU must support OpenGL 4.5 in order to run this game. As I understand it, that’s anything including and after the GeForce 400 series for Nvidia, and anything including and after the HD 7000 series for AMD. If you have an older card than that, it’s probably refund time.

If it’s crashing because you’re alt-tabbing from the game, try setting it to run in Borderless Windowed mode instead (this may impact performance though).

An issue that has been highlighted by the community is the lack of SSE4.1 support so older CPUs are unable to run the game.

Failing all that, there’s a huge Reddit thread where people are compiling their No Man’s Sky crash issues. If nothing else, this will reassure you that you’re not alone in having problems running the game.

What are Hello Games going to do about this?

Grow more beards and say they’re a small team.

In a post on the official site they state they have “brought a new QA team on board today (larger than the entire Hello Games team!”, and that, “most critical issues” will be in a patch in the “near future”. A tickets support system will also be going in place next week but there is no timeframe for any of the issues to be resolved.

Alternatively … Sean Murray has been tweeting about PC issues, so keep an eye on his twitter feed for any further updates. There will doubtless be PC performance patches to come, but when those will appear is something only Hello Games can know.

Refund or not?

Some gamers may want to apply for Steam refund, but remember in order to receive one, you can’t have played more than two hours. This obviously only applies to anyone who can actually run the game currently.

UpdateHello Games testing No Man’s Sky fix for older CPUs and more

Update 2: Still having problems with No Man’s Sky? Try the experimental branch patch


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