No Man's Sky 'experimental' patch addresses performance issues, fixes alt-tab bug

No Man's Sky didn't have a spectacular launch last week, with many users experiencing niggling performance issues, and some unable to play the game at all. Following an early patch the next one is still a work in progress, but if you're finding the game unplayable in its current state you can access it right now.

As per an official Hello Games missive, the new patch addresses the jittery framerate, fixes the inability to effectively alt-tab back into the game, and turns Gsync off by default (it's currently the opposite). Meanwhile, the patch ushers in improved AMD Phenom support, improved mouse performance and better performance on CPUs with less than four threads.

If you're able to play the game satisfactorily already, don't rush ahead and install this patch as it's still classified 'experimental'. If you're having issues but they can be addressed by these workarounds, the studio advises that you do that, instead of install the patch.

Still, if your game is well and truly borked, right click on No Man's Sky in Steam, hit Properties and then Betas, and join it with the code '3xperimental'.

Chris is currently preparing his review of No Man's Sky, and you can read about his progress over here. So far, it's the biggest Steam launch of the year, with over 212,000 concurrent players playing at once.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.