![No Man's Sky: Optimization 2019 + VR [Updated] for No Man's Sky](https://steamsolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/no-man-s-sky-optimization-2019-vr-updated-no-man-s-sky.jpg)
Overview
Here’s a concise step by step guide to improve performance in no Man’s Sky VR (and some things will work even without VR). Not everything will work for everyone. Some fixes may make your particular system worse performing.
Part 1
Many things have changed and you can get away with a lot more now since the fixes are fast and furious.
Here’s a concise step by step guide to improve performance in no Man’s Sky VR (and some things will work even without VR). Not everything will work for everyone. Some fixes may make your particular system worse performing.
Rift + Intel seems to have more trouble than Ryzen + SteamVR native devices.
1. DRIVERS. Update your Nvidia and Intel and AMD Chipset & GPU drivers.
2. Opt into the experimental beta for NMS. The fixes there are huge. 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 press “CHECK CODE”, and it’ll let you in, then select it from the dropdown menu.
3. In yourdrive: steamappscommonNo Man’s SkyBinaries find “NMS.exe” . Right click it, and click properties. Click “compatibility” and click “Change High DPIsettings” click “Override High DPI scaling settings” and set it to “Application Controlled”. This removes a layer that windows puts on 3D apps now, and since the game is not in a pure “Direct Mode” (yet) this removes that latency and helps frame-rate. This is similar to how Elite Dangerous was on the DK2 in the early days of Windows 10. This also may improve fidelity of menu items depending on your monitor.
4. Turn off windows “Game Mode” by searching for the settings in the start menu. This is normally a good thing for most games but it throttles background processes it thinks are not the main game thread. No Man’s Sky has custom threading and this lassos it, which is bad.
5. Install SteamVR beta and Steam Client beta. No exceptions. There’s a specific fix for no man’s sky in the latest update.
6. I recommend only having one other monitor active. If you have a high refresh rate monitor, use that one.
7. In Nvidia and AMD GPU Control Panels, Force off Vsync always, turn on “Prefer Maximum Performance”. Set “VR pre-rendered frames” to application controlled instead of 1, (which is for some crazy reason still the default for Nvidia. Newer games override this setting, but games built “the old way” like No Man’s Sky do not)
8. If you’re on Nvidia turn off threaded optimization “auto”. Set it to off instead. They’re doing this directly and there might be some kinda conflict. If it makes it worse, force it on. These settings reduce shimmer for me:
9. For both Nvidia and AMD, I recommend MSI Afterburner or just AMD drivers and setting an aggressive fan curve and power limit. You don’t want to be throttling down if the card warms up. Your CPU should also be staying cool. You need to be hitting turbo cores.
10. You can now use as of the latest patch, “motion smoothing” in SteamVR with no problems most of the time, so leave it on unless things seem worse. (You’re on the SteamVR beta like I said in step 7, right?) If you keep going above 11ms in 90hz, turn it off.
11. Set your application specific SteamVR resolution for No Man’s Sky to 100%
12. Turn off Advanced Supersample filtering in SteamVR Dev options. Do not turn on GPU profiling, it causes slowdowns.
13. On the video tab, use manual resolution. Change your global SteamVR application resolution to something like 100% for now. IF YOU CHANGE THIS, you need to restart No Man’s Sky to see the changes. It DOES NOT work on the fly like other games.
14. Go to C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonNo Man’s SkyBinariesSETTINGS and edit TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.VR.MXML and TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.mxml and set numhighthreads 4 and numlowthreads 2. Big improvement on the CPUside. Try 2 and 1 if you have a Quad Core.
15. Okay, go ahead and and load the game now. This imgur link has my in game settings, I recommend using these. Don’t use TXAA unless you find it “clearer” It’s a blurry mess for me, use FXAA.
I can also get away with HBAO standard, but maybe you can’t. These are something you can fiddle with, everything but planetary will work without restarting the game. I also recommend turning off vignette and scanline effects in some of the other setting menus.
16. The game now must remain in focus. It cannot have anything on top of it or not be the active window, or you’ll lag. OVR Toolkit/OvrDrop might give you issues.
17. Optional: you should be good with the above, but you can try turning off HPET (high performance event timer) in your UEFI(bios) which can help CPU bound applications like this one.
Part 2
Bottom line up front: Tweak Windows 10 Exploit Protection
1. Go to Start Menu, start typing ‘Exploit’
2. Click “Exploit Protection” from the list that appears
3. Click “Program Settings”
4. Click “Add program settings to customize”, “Choose Exact Path”
5. Find the NMS executable (C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonNo Man’s SkyBinariesNMS.exe)
6. Find NMS in the list, click ‘Edit’
7. Scroll down the list, and override Flow Control Guard and Data Execution Prevention, disable both.
8. ????
9. PROFIT
Explanation:
Like a lot of users I’ve been experiencing a lot of stuttering, especially during low altitude flight. I’d also been experiencing problems where the VR headset would become increasingly stuttery and even hang during busy scenes, this got worse over time and I’d have to restart the app every hour or two.
After a lot of analyzing the graphs from the VR compositor, processor overhead etc. I couldn’t narrow down the problem to either the graphics pipeline OR NMS itself; it was like each tick in the application was being delayed and slowed down by an outside process.
This might not be the case for everyone, but in SOME cases this might be the problem.
Part 3
In your steamvr.vrsettings file in your root steam install directory (C:Program Files (x86)Steamconfig) also try adding “allowAsyncReprojection” : false, (comma is important unless it’s the last entry) as one of the options. They pulled it. I use the following:
},
“steamvr” : {
“allowAsyncReprojection” : false,
“allowDisplayLockedMode” : false,
“allowSupersampleFiltering” : false,
“enableHomeApp” : false,
“haveStartedTutorialForNativeChaperoneDriver” : true,
“installID” : “12957316620015736393”,
“lastVersionNotice” : “1.7.9”,
“lastVersionNoticeDate” : “1566324768”,
“mirrorViewGeometry” : “0 0 720 400”,
“motionSmoothing” : false,
“supersampleManualOverride” : false,
“supersampleScale” : 1.0
},