The No Man's Sky PC launch was far from stellar; here are quick fixes to the biggest problems

There are few games that have garnered as much attention from gamers as No Man’s Sky. Developed by an indie game studio, the game was never meant to be as big or as steeped with expectations as it currently is.

While the developers have always been very clear about what No Man’s Sky actually is, “a game about exploration and survival in an infinite, procedurally generated universe,” gamers’ imaginations have run wild. Their expectations from the game have far outstripped the developer’s promise, leading to massive disappointment for some. This much anticipation and expectation isn’t healthy for a AAA title and even more so for an indie title like No Man’s Sky. The game’s PS4 launch went off without a hitch, but when it came to PC, the experience was far from stellar.

Numerous complaints flooded forums, Steam and the game’s subreddit. People complained of stuttering frame-rates, inability to get beyond the lock screen, constant crashes, game freezes and clunky controls. If you are suffering from any or all the above, we’ve compiled a list of the most egregious issues, along with possible solutions. Here goes: OpenGL 4.5 This is something that’s not obvious from the start, but your graphics card needs to support OpenGL 4.5, which is the version previous to Vulkan, and only then can you play the game. If you have an older generation card, this game will not run smoothly. There will be crashes and stuttering and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Or is there? Slyther55 on Reddit seems to have stumbled upon a solution that works for everyone. Low fps or stuttering gameplay  First, head to the graphics options and set the MaxFPS option to Max. It’s usually locked to 30 FPS. Disable Vsync if necessary as well. This should smoothen out your experience.  If this doesn’t work, you’ll need to manually edit the game’s config file. The file is located in ‘…SteamLibrarySteamAppscommonNo Man’s SkyBinariesSETTINGS’ at Steam’s install location. You’re looking for a file labelled ‘TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.MXML’. Open it, preferably with Notepad++, and change the gsync and vsync values to ‘false’. These two changes should fix almost all frame-rate issues. You can also try switching to ‘Borderless Window’ mode in the settings, it’s apparently helped some people. Lastly, try settings nms.exe to high priority in the task manager. If you’re still having trouble and toning down settings didn’t help, download the 369.00 beta drivers from Nvidia. If you’re on an AMD GPU, you can try these drivers. If even this doesn’t work, your PC’s either not up to scratch, or you have some driver issues, or you’re completely out of luck and have to wait on tenterhooks till Hello Games releases a patch. Visuals not so splendid  If the in-game visuals aren’t up to the mark and in particular, you’re seeing a lot of jagged edges and lines, turn up the anti-aliasing as far as it will go. If your system supports it, uses Nvidia’s DSR, or the AMD equivalent, to scale the resolution to 2K or 4K. This should vastly improve image quality on beefy PCs. Of course, the real issue is that the game is rendering at 720p and scaling up to suit whatever resolution you picked. Until Hello Games fixes this issue, there’s nothing much that you can do. I suppose these are the downsides of the game being a console port. Game crashes If your game is regularly crashing, try toning down the settings and/or switching to borderless window mode. If you are crashing with an MSVCR100.dll error message, download Microsoft Visual C++ 2010. Other issues might be a result of corrupted files. In this case you’ll need to verify the game cache (in Steam) or download the game again. This shouldn’t be so hard since the installer is only 2.5GB. Stay tuned for more updates on the game, as well as a collection of tips and tricks to get you through. I’d like to extend a big thank you to the good folk on the No Man’s Sky subreddit who helped solve most of these issues; in particular, Atranox, for compiling everything under one post.