No Man’s Sky – Experimental Branch Patch for PC

Since it’s PC launch a couple of days ago through Steam, reviews and comments about No Man’s Sky have been…less than stellar. Plagued with bugs, glitches, technical and performance issues, one of 2016’s most anticipated games, it could be argued, has so far failed to live up to the immense expectations that was expected of it after 2 years of waiting.

But developers at Hello Games have not rested on their laurels, they have been working tirelessly to continue improving No Man’s Sky, and to make it a much more palatable experience. And they seem to have taken the first step with an announcement on the Steam website.

Firstly, they have released a list of workarounds, without the need for a specific patch, which again can be found on the Steam website. However, you may want to download the “Experimental” patch through the Steam launcher, which will change the following aspects of the game:

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

To access the patch, you need to right click on No Man’s Sky in your Steam library and select “Properties”, then click on the “BETAS” tab. The code to access this is “3xperimental” and the branch that you need to access is listed in a drop-down menu named “Select the beta you would like to opt into:”.

The guidance as ever with any No Man’s Sky issues is to email them at: [email protected] (any issues with this Experimental patch must include “[EXPERIMENTAL]”). Lastly, Hello Games also want to know if the Experimental patch/branch has helped fixed any issues experienced since launch – any feedback is good feedback!

Have you been playing No Man’s Sky on PC? Have you had a smooth run or been hampered by issues? Whatever your No Man’s Sky experience, let us know in the comments below or in the RGM Forums.