Experimental Branch 16/04: Vulkan Update

[Hello Games]

Update: 14/05

We have updated the experimental branch build:

• Improved vsync on AMD.
  
• Fixed some rare crashes.
  
• Fixed some windowing issues.

Also there was an update to the nvidia driver last week which addresses some issues.
Nvidia drivers download[www.nvidia.co.uk]

Update: 29/04

We have updated the experimental branch build:

• 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

We have updated the experimental branch build:

• 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].
  
• Fixed some other rare crashes.

HDR:

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.

Experimental Branch 16/04: Vulkan Update

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:

• 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 always, thank you to all players who use Experimental and take the time to report any issues you encounter.

Accessing the Experimental Branch

More 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".

[GravityWave]

It appears the Combat Scope is broke too! (on the PC). I can zoom with scanner, but not a tool. Should be same 'zoom' keymapping, right? Did I miss something else? Bummer. Keymaps again?

[EvilPolygons]

GravityWave eredeti hozzászólása:

It appears the Combat Scope is broke too! (on the PC). I can zoom with scanner, but not a tool. Should be same 'zoom' keymapping, right? Did I miss something else? Bummer. Keymaps again?

It works. You have to switch to the combat zoom, just like the grenade launcher, and then activate as you would the GL.

[GravityWave]

I was on top of an ancient ruin dome, and the metal cap went transparent. I'm seeing fewer close 'collision' events now too. For example, right up close to an Atlas P2 door is now stable. Cloud masking on the horizon on colored planets is pretty blocky when low.

[GravityWave]

I remapped the 'scanner' zoom to my middle mse btn clk. I remapped the GL to 'u' cuz I was blowing myself up too often when using the mse, so I mapped it to a kbd. I'll try the 'u' tomorrow. Never would have guessed that one. I suppose it makes sense now, 2nd weapon, activate. Zoom is only for scanner then. Obviously not ready for Ironman.

[EvilPolygons]

GravityWave eredeti hozzászólása:

I remapped the 'scanner' zoom to my middle mse btn clk. I remapped the GL to 'u' cuz I was blowing myself up too often when using the mse, so I mapped it to a kbd. I'll try the 'u' tomorrow. Never would have guessed that one. I suppose it makes sense now, 2nd weapon, activate. Zoom is only for scanner then. Obviously not ready for Ironman.

Yep, the combat zoom essentially functions like a secondary weapon. Hold your secondary fire button when the combat zoom is selected, and it'll zoom in your primary weapon.

[Caldor]

I have come across a bug... not sure if its specific to the experimental, but I am using experimental so...

Well the problem is when I try to take a photo. Was pretty random that I came across this, but I had a mission to take a photo of an animal. I was at my main base and figured... well I have animals right here, so I took a photo. But the screen froze, I could hear the photo had been taken and that my mission got completed, but I could not get out of photo mode... well I could not get away from the screen.

The screenshot that Steam got from it was distorted. Like a bunch of strange pixels. I did not save any of them, but I did use the regular Steam screenshot feature to take a photo of my plants:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1741020526

As you can tell, I placed a LOT of them pretty much on top of each other. So I am thinking the advanced photo feature decided to try to render them better and blew a fuse? Not sure... but I tried all kinds of angles around the base, first I tried being on another planet, then away from my base and then different angles at my base. And it seems to only happen when these plants are in the photo.

Does not seem like a serious bug, but I figured it was best to report it, since maybe there were bigger issues causing this.

[Booning]

The latest update (14/05) seems to have resolved the crash when doing anything freighter related on my capital ship. I can now see my fleet again.

Nice work!

[PurSpyk!!]

Odd installed this update have the latest Nvidia drivers installed and I get a Vulkan error message (driver compatibility warning), all other games using this API on my system run fine.

Fixed, deleted old configuration files, now works, still a bit slower that OpenGl on my system, using Titan X 4K resolution

[1hp]

Until the last update of the game and the drivers FPS did not fall below 50, but now periodically drops to 15. Excellent work.

core i5 8400
gtx 1060 6gb
16 ram
ssd

[Caldor]

1hp eredeti hozzászólása:

Until the last update of the game and the drivers FPS did not fall below 50, but now periodically drops to 15. Excellent work.

core i5 8400
gtx 1060 6gb
16 ram
ssd

Not sure when this update happened, but I did notice yesterday that it after a while went below 30 FPS. Was able to stay above 60 FPS for a long time, nearly 90 FPS. But then it decided to stay below 20 fps, around the 15 you mention. I suspect restarting the game would fix it. But have not tried it. Will try to keep an eye on when this FPS drop happens.

[JumpingBarista]

Performance hasn't improved.

GTX 1050
i7-7700
1TB HDD
12GB RAM

Has been at least 50-60% worse on Vulkan since it's first release.

[jcopus]

Processor Intel i7-3820 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3601 Mhz
Windows 10 Pro - Version 10.0.17763 Build 17763
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
installed latest NVIDIA drivers this morning.

Back up to 35 to 79 FPS, with all graphics cranked up. Tessellation on ultra.
On planet, freighter, space.
Usually cruises 50 - 60 FPS or better. a few screens will top 100.

Freighter hang ups on accessing Freighter consoles has stopped. :)

I had one base with a hang. I haven't been there yet to test. (Crossing fingers)

[GravityWave]

The update runs much smoother. I still can only really get 30fps. The VRAM came down to more like 3GB and the CPU spiking seems to be gone .......

The game has a hard crash to a video lockup when trying to land on a planet. I'd guess surface generation during re-entry. Twice now, definitely not able to land on planets anymore. No probs in space, on planet, or warping. Space stations are good too. I'll try some other settings, but VERY BAD!

I tried flying into a star today. Silly me. I appeared to hit a limit such that the star doesn't get bigger (no distance indicator ahead) and the distance to the planets behind me seemed to get limited. Oh well!

Why is there a rez setting for Full Screen and not the wondoze modes? I think it was using 1080p before, and now I'm not sure. It looks like 1440p in borderless now.

The Combat Scope is soo disappointing! And after re-mapping to scanner zoom, I immediately started blowing myself up again with the middle mse thinking to scan zoomed. Back to 'u'.

Camera settings do appear to be local to photo's now too. I suppose that is good.

[JAGIELSKI]

I've thought that stars in NMS being just a skybox is a common knowledge?

I mean, they've tested actual star system physics (maybe not as accurate as say Universe Sandbox, but still actual planets orbiting actual stars) in development (before even the leaked version) but blah blah blah focus testing blah blah blah people get confused blah blah.

[DogsConkers]

i7
gtx1080
graphics all medium
windows 10
latest drivers
tried 1080 and 1440

Unplayable - will leave it another month