No Man's Sky offers new PC patch beta

No Man's Sky had a troubled PC launch, but developer Hello Games is on the case and just released a new "experimental" Steam branch that players can implement, effectively testing out an upcoming patch before it gets implemented as the new norm.

To access it, players need to right-click on the game from the Library page and select "Properties". From there, select "Betas" and the new branch should be listed in a dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into." The code is: "3xperimental".

So, without further ado, here's what it fixes:

AMD Phenom Support:: 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. Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.

Mouse Smoothing:: Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in "Mouse Smoothing". It now defaults to off. If you feel the framerate is "slow" or "lumpy", please make sure that this is turned off (it helps players with sub-30 fps).

Improved Performance: On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved. On CPUs with 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.

Radeon 6xxx: Added support for this GPU, which doesn't support OpenGL 4.5 fully.

Player Saves: Help to recover some player saves which had been lost or corrupt.

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

Shader Caching: 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 will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards.

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

Intel GPU Detection: 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: Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users.