No Man’s Sky PC Performance Review
1080p Testing
To start off, No Man’s Sky has a lot of issues on PC, so much so that such a detailed performance assessment is almost unnecessary.
No matter what GPU I used the game suffered from huge performance dips, especially when starting the game and when travelling to newly discovered planets or when traversing newly generated terrain.
When comparing all of these GPUs we travelled to the most graphically intensive planet that we had found in the game after around 5 hours of play, which was a plant filled world which is filled with giant mushrooms and trees.
This planet also proved very useful for showcasing the difference in a lot of the graphical quality settings, but all in all the game is still a mess on the PC platform, where we experienced a lot of crashes when starting the game and other strange performance issues.
To make this test as fair as possible, each benchmark we did was done after a solid 3 minutes of gameplay to minimise the game’s performance hitches, though this does not eliminate them entirely. The test includes running around grassy terrain, getting into your ship, taking off and then flying across the planet for 60 seconds. In space flight, gamers will experience higher performance than this, simply because there is not much to render other than a black sky.
In the results below we can see that at 1080p that nothing below our reference GTX 980Ti was able to achieve a solid 60FPS framerate, though it must be noted that both it and the GTX 1070 do experience random slowdowns at certain locations in the game when outside of this benchmarking run.
We can also see that AMD’s GPUs are easily outperformed by their Nvidia counterparts which is unsurprising given this game’s use of the OpenGL 4.5 API, which has for a long time been a weak point for AMD.
