No Man's Sky How to Make It Run Better

How I made No Man's Sky look far better and play better on PC

So, it's no secret… the PC port is god awful for the game. People reporting hitching, frame drops, crashes… you name it, the game has it.

Luckily for me, the game ran pretty much OK. You can see my other post on How I managed to fix No Man's Sky on my PC on how I got it working better, with a solid frame rate, and less hitching.

But this post will cover how I got the game to look and feel better on PC.

There are a few people reporting low in game rendered resolutions. I am one of them. I noticed that the game was rendering at a lower res and being upscaled. This doesn't seem to affect everyone, but what I did notice that by adjusting the resolution lower, the in game render was lower, and vice versa.
So I'll also be covering on how to get it to render higher (on Nvidia).

Experimental Branch

There is a patch for PC which is available on the Experimental branch. This will eventually be released to PC on the official branch, but for now you can easily access this and play with the patch.

There is a list of changes on the Steam Community Forum but in short, the following points are worthy of note:

• UPDATE: 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 fps)
• UPDATE: Improved Performance
  On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.
  On CPUs with 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.
• 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

These 3 points are the most important ones, as they directly affect everyone. Especially the shader caching, as it will pre-cache the shaders before the game loads, to reduce the hitching.

So first step, it to get this branch installed.

Open the game properties in Steam, click on the BETAS tab, and type in "3xperimental" (without the quotes) into the code box. Once accepted, select the experimental branch from the drop down box. A small patch will be applied.

Nvidia Program Profile Settings

Second… Nvidia profile settings.

There are a number of changes for the NMS profile that you can make to instantly make it look better.

Since a lot of in game settings simply don't work (Anti Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering etc.) you can override these settings with Nvidia.

To access this, right click somewhere on your desktop, and select "Nvidia Control Panel"
Once open, select "Manage 3D Settings" on the tree menu.

The first thing I did was set the program properties and adjust a few values as shown:

I'll go through the changes now

Anisotropic Filtering — Since this doesn't work in game, we are overriding it here. For my monitor size, 8x seems fine. You can adjust this to your liking.
Resource Usage: Low

AntiAliasing — FXAA — Again, the AA in the game doesn't work. FXAA is pretty shitty when it comes to AA, but it just adds a layer. We'll be adding further AA in a bit. You can have this enabled or disabled at your liking.
Resource Usage: Minimal-None

AntiAliasing — Mode — There are a few options here, but what we want to to is Override any application setting. Why? Because we don't want the game to take control over our AntiAliasing, as it doesn't work. Doing this ensures that the settings we make, completely override any setting the game makes.
Resource Usage: None

AntiAliasing — Setting — Here is how much AntiAliasing we want to apply. It says 2x in the screenshot, but I have since upped this to 4x. I suggest the same… remember the higher you go, the more resources it will need. Larger monitors and resolutions tend to need higher amounts of AA applied.
Resource Usage: Medium (depending on setting chosen)

Multi-Framed Sampled AA (MFAA) — This is Nvidia's special AA. Uses little resources while providing very decent AntiAliasing. It is only available on select cards, so this option may not be available for you. If it is, I highly suggest using it.
Resource Usage: Low-Medium

Texture Filtering — Negative LOD Bias — Basically, because we enabled AF, this will automatically be set to Clamp. It's better this way, as in short; When AF is enabled, it will sharpen static textures, but start introducing aliasing when in motion. Clamping this reduces this effect.
Resource Usage: Low

Threaded Optimization — Self explanatory. Optimizes the game to spread it's usage over multiple cores. Which most modern machines have these days.
Resource Usage: Low

These settings will dramatically enhance the way the game looks. There are so many jaggies in the game without proper antialiasing, so with these options enabled, it will significantly help with the visuals of the game without hitting your machine too hard.

Nvidia DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution)

I mentioned in the previous article that I enabled DSR to help render the game in a higher resolution… If you want to know how I did that, check the article HERE and go down to where I mentioned how I made the game look better.

Mods

Oh yes… mods are finally here people! Modders have managed to decompile certain files to make certain parts of the game moddable. This goes from Sound, to graphics, to functions. As it is still early modding days right now, I'm sure that new and better mods will appear in the near future.

But for now, here are the mods I've been using:

• Fast Actions
  This removes those 'long clicks' for menu's and picking up resources. As it stands you need to hold the mouse button down to select things. With this, it's just a click. So it makes picking up resources from plants quicker and managing your inventory quicker. Just a simple click away with this mod.
• Instagram Filter Remover
  Or what I like to call, the piss filter. Currently the game has this horrid yellowish tint across the screen. Making everything white, look like piss, and everything else look like piss. This removes the piss effect, so you get the pure colours that the game has.
• Chromatic Aberration + Vignetting + Scan Lines Removal
  Removes all of the above.

Chromatic aberration looks like this:

Chromatic Aberration

Vignetting looks like this:

Vignetting

And Scanlines look like this:

Scanlines

All of the above effects are by default enabled in the game. Without these effects, the game looks sooo much better.

• Shutup
  Self explanatory really. You can use this to shut the voice up when it keeps going on about "Shield Low" or "Life Support Low". That Life Support warning is so annoying, especially when you're sitting at 75%… it's not low at all… yet the computer voice tells you it is. With this mod, you can disable that.

There are also other mods available to take a look at, but these are the 4 that I'm currently using. You can check them all out HERE

Conclusion

For some randomly weird and totally-against-science thing… I'm actually getting better FPS with these mods on. I think that these filters that they have enabled in the game screw with the FPS, as I'm now sitting at 100–120 FPS easily, with very rare drops below 100.

There are going to be more mods popping up (actually since I last checked the site, there seems to be a few more), each with their own different benefit for the game.
But remember, before applying the mods, check the comments. Make sure it doesn't fuck with things that you don't want fucked.

So, I hope you enjoy your new looking, improved and better game!

No Man's Sky How to Make It Run Better

Source: https://medium.com/@retardedpenguin3/how-i-made-no-mans-sky-look-far-better-and-play-better-on-pc-ea631480af4d

Share this post