Gamers who patiently waited for the PC version of space exploration game No Man's Sky to be released are now extremely disappointed, as the title comes with performance issues right upon its launch.
No Man's Sky for PC, released Aug. 12 on Steam and GOG for $59.99, has not been living up to expectations, with a variety of issues that are preventing players from starting their space exploration adventure.
On the game's Steam page as of this writing, No Man's Sky has already garnered nearly 5,000 negative reviews, compared with over 3,000 positive reviews. Players have reported issues that include crashing every time they launch the game, heavy stuttering and frame rate drops.
As detailed on the same page, the minimum system requirements for the title are 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10; an Intel Core i3 processor with at least 8 GB of RAM; a GPU equivalent to Nvidia GTX 480 or AMD Radeon 7870; and 10 GB of available storage. However, despite players using computers that far exceed these system requirements, they are still experiencing the game's reported performance issues.
In its tests of the game, Ars Technica reported that there has been inconsistency in frame rates and instances of freezing, despite the two PCs they are using boasting specifications of Nvidia GTX 980Ti cards, 16 GB of RAM and either a Haswell i7 or Skylake i5 Intel processor, with Windows 10 and fully-updated drivers.
No Man's Sky for the PC defaults to a cap of 30 frames per second, which can be disabled in the game's options. When the setting is turned on, the title keeps dropping to 20 frames per second, but when the cap is removed, frame rate reaches 60 frames per second. However, the frame rate randomly keeps dropping down to 30 frames per second.
Kotaku, using a PC powered by a 4.2 GHz Intel i7 processor and an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, is also experiencing performance issues of hitching and stuttering that happens from the loading screen and continues into gameplay.
The confusing thing is that No Man's Sky runs well on the PlayStation 4, despite the gaming console packing relatively weaker processing power compared with some of the PCs that are experiencing performance issues.
A lengthy thread on the PC version's performance issues has spawned on the subreddit for No Man's Sky, where it has been determined that most of the problems are due to the game itself and not players' hardware. One of the reasons for the issues has been pinpointed to be the lack of SSE4.1 support, which is something that players can fix but is something that is the fault of developer Hello Games.
No Man's Sky director Sean Murray has acknowledged the PC performance issues on his Twitter account, through which he provided possible solutions. Murray promised that Hello Games will try to solve the issues as soon as possible, with a patch already uploaded within minutes of the game's launch. The patch, however, did not seem to help.
PC users who have been excited to dive into No Man's Sky are now forced to wait for a fix to be applied to the title, which is a letdown as most were expecting a smooth experience similar to what PlayStation 4 gamers have had so far.
