No Man’s Sky Gets Vulkan Support on PC, Which Should Deliver Better Performance Especially on AMD GPUs

Hello Games announced on the official No Man’s Sky website the availability of a new patch for the experimental branch of the game on PC.

The main new feature is the addition of support for the Vulkan API. According to the developers of No Man’s Sky, this should yield an immediate performance benefit, particularly to players using AMD graphics cards.

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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:

• OpenGL has been replaced by Vulkan.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.

As a reminder, No Man’s Sky is getting a new big and free update called Beyond later this year. It’ll add full Virtual Reality support (on both PC and PlayStation 4) and expand the multiplayer experience.