No Man’s Sky PC Performance Review

Introduction

 

No Man’s Sky is easily one of the most popular releases of 2016, with over 200,000 people playing this title on launch day on Steam. 

With the promise of a procedurally generated galaxy with endless exploration opportunities in both space and the game’s almost endless supply of planets No Man’s Sky has always had a lot to live up too, especially as the hype machine has grown to insane levels. 

With the promise of additional content in the future like base building, piloting freighters and more planned is No Man’s Sky a £39.99 early access game? Let’s find out.

 

  

Drivers 

For this game, we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Game Ready Geforce 368.81 driver and AMD’s 16.8.2 driver, both of which are the most recent GPU drivers for either company. 

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using both high-end and mid-range GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. 

 

Game Test Rig
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.7GHz
ASUS Maximus VIII Hero
G.Skill Ripjaws 4x4GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

         

Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Middle) GTX 1070 Founders Edition (Right)

 

For the high-end we will be testing AMD’s R9 Fury X, the GTX 980Ti and the GTX 1070.  Sadly we do not have a GTX 1080 to test at this time. 

For the Mid-range offerings we will be testing the new RX 480 and GTX 1060, both of which will be the ASUS Strix Gaming models.

 

     

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix (Left), ASUS RX 480 Strix (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s lower-end GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models. 

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar price points, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

            

Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)