No Man's Sky's recently released Next update radically improves content and visuals and we've had a lot of fun playing it in its new Xbox One X incarnation - but we've got to say that the PC version still needs a lot of work. Performance doesn't seem to be where it should be, even on higher-end GPUs while basics like v-sync don't seem to work properly. On top of that, right from the off, basic user-friendliness comforts and presentation create a genuinely poor introduction to the game. For a title that has improved so dramatically since launch, we genuinely hope to see Hello Games make one last push to make life easier for PC users.
It starts with the game's first load, where No Man's Sky spends a lot of time pre-caching shaders. On a top-end Ryzen processor, this procedure takes over three minutes to complete, while other reports have seen waiting times of anything up to ten minutes depending on the CPU in question. As first impressions go, this is pretty dreadful and really needs to be improved. Secondly, there's the joypad orientated options selection system that still sees you holding down a button or key to actually make a change. Next up, there's No Man's Sky's remarkable lack of user-friendliness in tweaking for performance - adjusting options inevitably leads to the need to completely restart the game. Even turning off v-sync requires a full reload of the game... really?
And that leads us on to the next major issue - the implementation of v-sync doesn't seem to act as it should and there are profound performance implications as a result. With v-sync enabled on a Ryzen 7 1700X/GTX 1070 system, frame-rate monitors report a solid 60fps, however on-screen motion is plagued with stutter and running captured footage through our tools, the game seems to ricochet between 16ms and 33ms frame-times. Turning off v-sync seems to put the game into a borderless windowed mode, where frame-rate can exceed 60fps but there's no sign of any tearing. It's an improvement but it's still not working correctly.