No Man’s Sky’s current list of PC patches fix ‘around 70%’ of the game’s known issues

To say that No Man's Sky has issues may end up being the understatement of 2016, depending on who you ask of course. One thing that can't be debated, however, is that the game has suffered from severe performance issues for PC players, namely with game crashes and FPS drops. Hello Games has been working very hard to correct these issues with one of their solutions being an experimental patch that addresses a number of the largest problems.

Hello Games wrote a post on their official Steam forum, detailing all three of the PC version's patches that they claim to address roughly 70% of the game's known issues per the support tickets they have received as well as feedback from Steam, GOG, and Reddit users.

Here are the full patch details per Hello Games:

Patch 1

• Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.
• Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten to support AMD CPUs. The game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2,
• Havok Physics has also now created new libs for us to add Phenom support.

• Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt-Tab. This should now be resolved.

• On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.
• On CPUs with exactly 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.

• Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on. This is particularly true on ATI cards.

• On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been fixed.

• Added support for this GPU, which doesn't support OpenGL 4.5 fully.

• Solution to try to prevent saves getting corrupted no matter what’s going on in background processes (see Patch 3 below, where we also are attempting to recover corrupted saves).

• We do not currently support Intel GPUS. We are working on this for a future patch, to expand our min spec.
• In the meantime, the game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high-end GPU has not been selected.

• Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users

• Generally, this is most helpful for players with sub-30 FPS.
• Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in “Mouse Smoothing”.
• It defaults to off. If you feel micro stutters in framerate affecting controls, feel free to turn this up. If you feel the framerate is "slow" or "lumpy", please make sure that this is turned off

Patch 2

• It was possible for players to save their game stuck under the terrain, leaving them stuck. This was caused by getting shot down in the atmosphere, and their ship reaching ridiculous speeds as it crashed to the planet. This has been resolved.
• Whilst it won't happen anymore, if you are currently already stuck under the world, we detect this and do our best to rescue you.

• Occasionally at random, the game would lock up after a warp, or return to the desktop. This was due to very specific timing in hardware (a threading specific bug) – meaning that unfortunately for some people it was regular, and for others, they would never be able to recreate it. This was our most reported crash during gameplay and has now been resolved.

• If the player died, and then loaded the game ten times without saving, and then died, player progress wouldn’t be saved from then on until you died again. This is fixed now! This was also causing player’s saves to grow in size.

• Quite a rare crash, but in certain scenarios, it was possible to scan from space or on a planet and crash the game.

• When warping into a battle sometimes the player warped into the inside of a freighter and everything went crazy 🙁
• This is fixed now.

Patch 3

• If you died in your ship while in the atmosphere of a planet with a damaged ship, you could respawn in a space station with your launch thrusters and pulse engine damaged. If you did not have the resources to fix them then you could no longer take off and be stuck there. This will no longer happen.

• Some players have corrupted save files, we’ve been working with them to still load saves even if they are corrupted (this can happen for many reasons outside of the games control). This fix has allowed many players to still load their save even if they have become corrupt on PC.

• As the player gathers a huge amount of discoveries, there was a threading issue that becomes more prevalent the more discoveries you have, and could cause the game to crash.
• If you had collected a large number of blueprints, in a specific order it was possible to crash the game when you received a new blueprint. This has been fixed.
• Players who set a large number of waypoints could find themselves in a situation where they could crash the game in the Galactic Map, this is remedied now (PS. A better waypoint system is coming).

Source: [No Man's Sky Steam Forum]