With the release of No Man’s Sky Update 5.0 (known as Worlds Update Part I), Hello Games has also added NVIDIA DLSS 3 support on PC. Keep in mind that the studio’s comparison image is not representative of the frame rate boost GeForce RTX 40 will be able to get after enabling DLSS Frame Generation, as they simply picked the same comparison used for the original DLSS 2 (Super Resolution) when the feature was added to No Man’s Sky over three years ago.
NVIDIA DLSS 3 certainly has the potential to boost frame rates even further. However, Frame Generation currently makes things actually worse when enabled. The game feels far less smooth than it does without it, and it also introduces some weird flickering. Perhaps that’s why NVIDIA did not advertise the addition yet. Anyway, I checked with Hello Games and was told the developers are aware of the issue and will be pushing a hotfix. There’s already an experimental branch available on Steam, but its current list of fixes does not include DLSS 3 yet:
- Fixed a PC-only crash that could occur at the transition from the starfield to the game.
- Fixed an issue that caused graphical corruption on Mac.
- Fixed a crash related to interaction with NPCs on freighters.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when taking damage from the brood mother.
- Fixed a rare crash related to planetary objects.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when playing PSVR1 on PlayStation 5.
As a whole, this new No Man’s Sky update brought many tech improvements to engine, improving both fidelity and performance. Here’s the related excerpt from the changelog:
- The shadow-rendering system has been reworked to take advantage of screenspace shadowing techniques, resulting in more richly lit planets and more accurate and more detailed shadows.
- The rendering of planetary objects such as trees, rocks, and grass has been rewritten and moved to a more modern GPU-based system, allowing for more objects at a better performance.
- Distant planetary objects now look significantly more detailed and realistic.
- Terrain generation has been rewritten to incorporate dual marching cubes voxel meshing, which reduces vertex count, increases terrain generation speed, improves framerate, and saves significant amounts of memory.
- The component system has been reworked for increased speed and improved memory usage.
- Networking systems have been improved for reduced bandwidth usage.
- Significant memory and performance optimizations have been made across the entire game, particularly in metadata usage, texture streaming, LOD generation, and procedural mesh generation.
That is on top of the many rendering enhancements made to the sky, cloud, water, and environmental effects. Are you already back into No Man’s Sky, or are you waiting to actually be able to use NVIDIA DLSS 3?
