With the release of No Man’s Sky on PC marked by performance issues, Hello Games is implementing a hot fix for some of the most pressing concerns, but stopping just short of making it official. Setting up an Experimental Branch of the game that players can access, the developer is trying the water before adding the changes to the full game.
The hot fixes are currently in testing with the internal team, but in an effort to allow players to enjoy the game as soon as possible, the Experimental Branch is available to everyone. Posting on Steam, Hello Games outlined the biggest changes:
- 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.
The Experimental Branch is accessible through the BETAS tab, in Properties, on your library page. Entering the code: ‘3xperimental’ will create a new branch of the game.
Late last week, Hello Games Head Sean Murray announced the developer had hired a new QA team to work alongside the Sony QA team in ironing out the issues with No Man’s Sky as quickly as possible.
We enjoyed No Man’s Sky, saying in our review that despite the title’s less than stellar endgame, “No Man’s Sky is a beautiful, open-ended survival game that makes phenomenal use of procedural generation in order to turn players into actual explorers.”