No Man’s Sky Experimental Patch Addresses Embarrassing Launch Bugs And Performance Pitfalls

No Man’s Sky was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of 2016, and launched this past week on both the PlayStation 4 and PC (sorry, Xbox One gamers). However, the launch has been marred with controversy after controversy. First of all, early PS4 copies of game leaked early, then some sites decided to break the embargo and post their thoughts on the game before the first official 1.03 patch was released.

However, the biggest letdown has to be for PC gamers. Shortly after the game’s release on Friday, the complaints started rolling in. Gamers have experienced crashes, various bugs, performance problems (screen tearing, unstable frame rates, etc.) and various gameplay glitches.

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Developer Hello Games at least is on top of things, and has acknowledged the numerous issues with the space epic. In the short term, the developer has posted a list of workarounds for some of the most annoying glitches that are plaguing the game. Here’s an example of a workaround for poor graphics performance:

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.

There are plenty of other workarounds listed, which could at least temporarily solve your No Man’s Sky issues. However, Hello Games has an experimental patch that’s being tested internally that should put a permanent end to these nagging problems. Some issues addressed in the patch include better AMD Phenom support, improved shader caching, smoother mouse control, and enhanced performance for gamers running processors with four or fewer threads. In addition, Gsync has been disabled by default.

If you’d like to access the beta branch of No Man’s Sky, you can right click on the game from your library and select properties. From there, you’ll need to access the BETAS tab and join using the code “3xperimental”.

Brandon Hill

Brandon Hill

Brandon received his first PC, an IBM Aptiva 310, in 1994 and hasn’t looked back since. He cut his teeth on computer building/repair working at a mom and pop computer shop as a plucky teen in the mid 90s and went on to join AnandTech as the Senior News Editor in 1999. Brandon would later help to form DailyTech where he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008 until 2014. Brandon is a tech geek at heart, and family members always know where to turn when they need free tech support. When he isn’t writing about the tech hardware or studying up on the latest in mobile gadgets, you’ll find him browsing forums that cater to his long-running passion: automobiles.

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