No Man’s Sky originally came out in 2016. However, it only recently released on the Nintendo Switch a couple of weeks ago. Reviews for the game have been gradually rolling out this month, with much of them being positive.
Despite all that, there are still questions about how the game does from a technical perspective. That’s where Digital Foundry comes in. They released a technical review of the game, saying that “performance generally holds up OK on No Man’s Sky – but perhaps the graphical downgrades cut too deep”. A summary from ResetEra can be seen down below.
- no multiplayer or settlements were cut, at least fo right now
- aggressive draw distance for geometry and shadows
- textures are low resolution
- volumetric clouds are low res, NPC animation cuts in half at close distances, some shadow maps flicker
- poor TAA
- docked: 1152×648 fixed
- handheld: 896×504 fixed
- flickering can be worse in handheld
- lack of postprocessing like motion blur and lens flare
- One S still has a lot of aliasing/shimmering at 900p
- 30fps generally, but has drops without warning in calm scenes
- in heavier sequences, drops to the low 20s
- transitions to planets and space causes heavy stuttering
- going crazy with base building can cause the frame rate to go sub-10fps and even break the game, forcing you to restart the application
- PS4 base building at similar insanity drops frame rate to low 20s with no graphical glitching
- XBO has low 20s when walking around, with extreme base building at ~15fps with no glitching
- ps4 is 1080p, xbo is 900p
- no cross progression
- game is $60, Oliver thinks it’s too much given the cuts and performance
