Experimental Branch 16/04: Vulkan Update

Update: 14/05

Improved vsync on AMD.



Fixed some rare crashes.



Fixed some windowing issues.

[www.nvidia.co.uk]

Update: 29/04

Falling back to CPU memory is now handled better on low-VRAM cards, this may fix some stuttering issues.



Reports of old or failing drivers have been made clearer.



Game now prefers GPUs with up-to-date drivers when making first-boot GPU selection.



Fixed a crash caused by certain very old drivers still being present on system even if not used.



Fixed HDR support not being detected on beta NVIDIA drivers.



Fixed certain effects being brighter than intended.



Fixed a banding issue in brightly-coloured skies.



Fixed an issue that caused text entry boxes to only show for one frame so you could not rename things.



Fixed an issue that could cause poor performance on the controls screen.

Update: 18/04

Fixed a bug that could cause artifacts around the edges of objects.



Fixed a crash that could occur on Windows 7.



Fixed an issue where the game could appear on the wrong monitor after switching to fullscreen.



An error message will now show up if old drivers are detected. It's likely that the game will crash following this error message. To remedy this please update your graphics card drivers: Nvidia [www.nvidia.co.uk] , AMD [www.amd.com] .



, AMD . Fixed some other rare crashes.

Experimental Branch 16/04: Vulkan Update

OpenGL has been replaced by Vulkan. Many players, particularly players with AMD graphics cards, should see a performance improvement.



Revised HDR support, updated output curve in line with advances in HDR calibration.



Adaptive and Triple-Buffered V-Sync are now selectable from Graphics Settings



Players with more than one GPU can now select which is used from Graphics Settings



Changing the following settings no longer require restarting:

Window Mode

Resolution

V-Sync

Shadow Detail

Reflection Quality

The ‘LOADING SHADERS’ load step has been removed, improving the loading experience.



Crash data is gathered via Steam to help us track down and fix issues.

We have updated the experimental branch build:Also there was an update to the nvidia driver last week which addresses some issues.We have updated the experimental branch build:We have updated the experimental branch build:We wanted to clarify some points about the HDR implementation. HDR is a new display standard that has been featured on many new monitors and TVs in the past few years. It allows monitors to display brighter colours than were previously possible.We have supported HDR on consoles for a while, but have been revisiting it in the last few months to take advantage of more recent techniques. The result of this work has been building an entirely new implementation that also works on PC. We want to eventually roll this out cross-platform, but we are keen to preview it and have your feedback. As such, we have integrated it into this experimental Vulkan build.If you have an HDR monitor you will be able to turn on HDR mode in the Windows 10 Display Settings control panel. If the game detects that HDR is available, you will see a new option in the game graphics settings which can be set to either HDR400, HDR600 or HDR1000. These are presets we've tweaked for the 3 most common HDR monitor standards, and relate to the peak brightness that the monitor can achieve.We're excited to know how you get on with this, please reply here to let us know.Hello everyone,We were thrilled by the response to the announcement of Beyond and the news that the game will be coming to VR. Bringing a game like No Man’s Sky to VR is a colossal technical undertaking, requiring major improvements to and optimisation of our engine. Your enthusiasm and excitement means so much to us as push on with this difficult task, and we will share more as soon as we are able.In the meantime, we have some news for players on PC. As part of our optimisation work, we have added Vulkan support to the game. We have been able to do this not only for Beyond, but for the current live version of the game. As such, we wanted to release this to you as soon as possible.Final Vulkan support will bring many PC players an immediate performance improvement, but it also helps us increase our options as we continue to make significant engine changes. It is only one portion of a large body of work that will see technical improvements for all players on all platforms.We have also added support for crash reporting. In the event of a crash, callstack data is collected via Steam (we already support this on other platforms). This will enable us to more quickly identify and respond to serious issues. We have updated the EULA to take this into account.As this is a large change - a complete overhaul of the graphics API - we will roll it out first to the PC Experimental branch, whilst we perform wider compatibility testing with the help of the brave experimental branch players.In future it will be rolled out to all players.The patch notes are as follows:As always, thank you to all players who use Experimental and take the time to report any issues you encounter.Accessing the Experimental BranchMore so than normal it's important that you update your video card drivers.Nvidia: https://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/index.aspx AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support Please note there is the possibility that experimental builds may introduce new issues that haven't been caught in test. We'd like to recommend that all players back up their save files, by making a local copy of the st_[userid] folder found here: %appdata%\HelloGames\NMS\Note that we don't anticipate any issues here. However, performing your own backups could mean the difference between resuming play immediately, or waiting for the next patch.If you decide to opt out of experimental and return to the main branch, we strongly recommend resuming from a backed-up save from the main branch, rather than taking an experimental branch save back to main, which may cause unexpected behaviour.Feedback and reports of new bugs/issues being found on Experimental are welcome, so please reply to this thread or submit a ticket to https://hellogames.zendesk.com/ with the phrase "Steam Experimental Vulkan" in the ticket title. If you are running any mods for the game, please list them along with your bug report.To play in Experimental, right-click on No Man's Sky from the Steam library page and select "Properties". Among the available tabs will be the "BETAS" tab. Enter "3xperimental" in the textbox and click "Check Code". "experimental - Experimental" will now be available in the dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into".