No Man’s Sky unlocks for the PC today, and even though we had to wait, it seems to have gone to good use. Nvidia revealed screenshots from the graphics menu of No Man’s Sky this morning, and if the 4K screens included are any indication, they look fairly up to snuff.
All the graphics staples are there, which is a relief. Screenshot artisans should be happy for 4K resolution support with adjustable FOV sliders and a HUD toggle. Texture detail, shadow detail, and reflections quality indicate a they’ll scale from Low to Ultra settings. We’re not sure what kind of difference they’ll make performance- or pretty-wise, but No Man’s Sky is no Crysis. Blowing up those flat textures to a high resolution and smoothing the edges may expose an unsightly 18 quintillion textures or so. There is a Generation Detail option, which increases "the image quality of the randomly-generated terrain and objects"—we just have no idea what a higher image quality entails.
Key and controller bindings are customizable as well, meaning we should be able to play using whatever device we like.
No Man's Sky defaults to a 30 fps cap on PC, so make sure you change that setting.August 12, 2016
We still don't know how many variables each field contains and the impact they have. It’s great to see independent flight and on-foot FOV sliders, but how far do they slide, exactly? To the moon? Sean Murray was recently tweeting about adding 21:9 resolution support, but whether or not it made the release build remains to be seen. As soon as we get our hands on the PC build, we’ll poke around and see how expansive the options are.
In the meantime, take a peek at the 4K screens Nvidia provided below, or check out our on-going No Man's Sky coverage:
- What's at the centre of the No Man's Sky universe?
- The weirdest, coolest No Man's Sky aliens and planets we've seen so far
- What No Man's Sky could learn about exploration from Kerbal Space Program
- No Man’s Sky impressions: our thoughts after two days on PS4
