No Man’s Sky Gets Vulkan Support

With the recent news that Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky is getting VR support, the team has also been working on other improvements.

In the latest development update, Hello Games has revealed that the game will be adding Vulkan support to the game replacing OpenGL.  While improvements were being made to handle VR, the addition of Vulkan support will also provide performance improvements for PC players, especially AMD users. Hello Games says that this latest addition will help them increase their “options” as they continue to make “significant engine changes”.

In other update news, crash reporting support has been added and data will be collected by Steam. This will allow Hello Games to respond quicker to “serious issues”.

The plan is to roll these changes out to the No Man’s Sky experimental branch as a test prior to unleashing them into the live game. This should at least keep complaints to a minimum. A list of patch notes have been released:

No Man’s Sky Patch Notes 16 April

• OpenGL has been replaced by Vulkan. Many players, particularly players with AMD graphics cards, should see a performance improvement
• Revised HDR support, updated output curve in line with advances in HDR calibration
• Adaptive and Triple-Buffered V-Sync are now selectable from Graphics Settings
• Players with more than one GPU can now select which is used from Graphics Settings
• Changing the following settings no longer require restarting:
  • Window Mode
  • Resolution
  • V-Sync
  • Shadow Detail
  • Reflection Quality
• The ‘LOADING SHADERS’ load step has been removed, improving the loading experience.
• Crash data is gathered via Steam to help us track down and fix issues.

It’s taken some time getting there, but No Man’s Sky is perhaps something worth taking a look at if you avoided the launch debacle. VR users will also be keen to check this out as there’s not exactly a load of great VR titles.