No Man's Sky PC Patch Detailed, Receives New Experimental Build

No Man's Sky launched on PC last week, and its first few days were pretty rough. But developer Hello Games was quick to state that it's working on fixes for many of the bugs. Today it published a post detailing its efforts, and it subsequently released more features and fixes in the beta build of the upcoming PC patch.

Writing on No Man's Sky's Steam page, Hello Games laid out its efforts to iron out the problems that have plagued the PC version. According to the developer, a number of hot fixes are currently in testing, and they'll go live to all PC players soon.

As we reported earlier, though, you can get your hands on these fixes right now by downloading the beta version of the upcoming patch. You can find the patch by right-clicking on No Man's Sky in your Steam library, selecting "Properties," navigating to the "Betas" tab, and entering in the code "3xperimental." This will open up an option in the drop-down menu to download the beta of this patch.

Today, Hello Games updated this beta build with even more fixes. You can see the patch notes below (today's additions are in italics).

Improved AMD Phenom Support:

• Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten to support AMD CPUs. The game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2; Havok Physics has also now created new libs. Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.

Mouse Smoothing:

• Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in "Mouse Smoothing." It now defaults to off. If you feel the framerate is "slow" or "lumpy," please make sure that this is turned off (it helps players with sub-30 frames per second).

Improved Performance:

• On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved. On CPUs with 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.

Radeon 6xxx:

• Added support for this GPU, which doesn't support OpenGL 4.5 fully.

Player Saves:

• Help to recover some player saves which had been lost or corrupt.

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.

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.

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. We are working on Intel GPU support.

G-sync

• G-sync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users.

We've downloaded the update in our office, and we were specifically happy with the new mouse smoothing options. We've found that it helps reduce stuttering.

Despite the rough launch, No Man's Sky performed very well commercially during its first few days on Steam. You can read our review here and check out more about the game, including our beginner's guides, here.