It looks like that 4K screenshot we were provided was created in some magical developer environment. No Man's Sky is the least stable game that we've worked on in years. Most games with poor optimization are still playable, and are consistent in their pitfalls; consistency permits some level of comparative benchmarking. With No Man's Sky, we're seeing nearly constant stutters and spectacular frame latency spikes in excess of 4000ms. The game exhibits severe stuttering that makes it unplayable at times and, by extension, impossible to accurately benchmark.

We've generated a few sets of benchmark data on a Titan X Pascal, 980 Ti, and RX 480 specifically to demonstrate just how wildly unpredictable the performance is. This is not an instance where we can just test anyway and produce charts as normal, because the FPS range is so wide that you'd end up with performance results that make no sense – like a GTX 1080 performing equally to a 980 Ti in averages in one test, but the opposite in another. That's due to variance introduced from somewhat unpredictable frame latency fluctuations, something we explain in part in this video.

Game-specific GPU benchmarks serve a single purpose: Hierarchically ranking the “best” products for each graphics configuration, resolution, and budget. The very heart of game benchmarking is to produce an objective comparative analysis between components. We have decided to present our findings with No Man's Sky, but have opted out of an immediate graphics card benchmark. This is because, in our eyes, such a benchmark would not be fair to the GPUs. The variance in results is so great that listings end up chaotic, and so we end up constrained and benchmarking the poor performance of No Man's Sky, rather than the performance of the cards themselves. The game is inadequate as a test platform, and cannot be trusted to generate reliable, replicable data from one test iteration to the next.

This GPU performance analysis of No Man's Sky looks at stutters and frame drops (“hitching”), poor optimization, screen flickering, and low FPS.

Taken on the new Titan X Pascal video card, this No Man's Sky screenshot was exclusively sent to GamersNexus and shows the game completely maxed-out at 4K. We're looking at something like "ultra" settings, with sliders and all toggles enabled, from what GN was told. We received the image from Hello Games earlier today, who will be shipping the game on PC in a matter of hours.

No Man's Sky is procedurally generated, so it'll be difficult to do a side-by-side comparison with consoles. The full-size image can be found below.

We reported recently that upcoming space exploration title No Man's Sky had been leaked, following news of a not-so-problematic 3-day delay for the PC platform. Now, with still more copies of the game floating around thanks to retailers, devs Hello Games posted news of a day-zero update that expands gameplay on a large scale. Bug fixes and optimizations will be deployed alongside feature additions (and improvements), and future updates were also teased, like base building.

The team also indicated a server wipe – not that anyone should technically be on there, anyway – and highlighted that early players should delete save games to retrieve the new update.

Over the last couple of days, multiple copies of upcoming space exploration game No Man’s Sky have been leaked despite the recent delay of its official release until August 12. The game officially went gold on July 7, meaning that physical copies are already being distributed to retailers.

Alongside Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky is among a new wave of ambitious space exploration titles landing on the PC platform. The game promotes planetary exploration as one of its core features, with procedurally generated planets, inhabitants, and atmospheres, but also leaves room for space flight and ship management.

No Man's Sky has already undergone a few delays, with its most recent pushing the PC release back to August 12 from the original August 9 release date. PlayStation 4 owners will see the game on shelves first, with developer Hello Games sticking to its August 9 launch for the console.

Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen achieved a major milestone with the distribution of its Alpha 2.0 package, allowing multiplayer exploration in addition to existing dog-fighting and free flight. This release gives players the first glimpse of the game's open world intentions, presenting environments forged in Sci-Fi influence.

There's not much in the way of gameplay just yet, but Alpha 2.0 has been made available to all backers for initial bug- and stress-testing. We decided to conduct a test of our own, specifically looking at GPU performance and preset scaling across multiple “game modes.” Right now, because the pre-release game is comprised of several disjointed modules, there's no one “Play Star Citizen” button – it's split into parts. Racing, free flight, and dog-fighting are in one module (Arena Commander), the Hangar stands alone, and online testing with ArcCorp and Crusader were just released.

For our Star Citizen video card benchmark, we look at GPU vs. GPU performance in the race, delta performance scaling on ArcCorp and in the hangar or free flight, and talk methodology. The game isn't done and has yet to undergo performance optimizations and official driver support, so we won't be recommending the usual “best graphics cards for [game]” this time, as we usually do in our game benchmarks.

Big news for Star Citizen fans: Alpha 2.0 is now available to all backers. This announcement comes on the heels of Star Citizen hitting a massive checkpoint, with Cloud Imperium Games now exceeding $100 million in crowdfunding. There are now more than one million backers -- or “citizens” -- and this CIG the Guinness World Record for “most crowd-funded project,” and game, in the world.

CIG CEO Chris Roberts said of Alpha 2.0, “it represents the first true slice of gameplay that includes much of what Star Citizen will bring to our fans.” This update will give backers many of the features Roberts has spent the last year toting.

The video game industry's news output is churning in full capacity as November nears. Our contacts and colleagues in the industry are almost ubiquitously undergoing crunch right now, working longer hours to finalize that last bit of content before “going Gold.” That means a lot of news, so we've decided to start rounding-up weekly game news at the end of the week.

This week, the items to watch have been No Man's Sky for its “I've Seen Things” trailer (and release date), Star Citizen for an updated flight model, GOG's introduction of ancient RPGs to its service, Overwatch beta, and Fallout 4's mod support.

Full news coverage in the video, though I've also posted the script below:

We were recently joined by Cloud Imperium Games' Chris Roberts, known best for space sim Star Citizen, to discuss DirectX 12, Vulkan (OpenGL Next), and game engine pipelines. This content has been split into two pieces: This content and the second video & article, which will discuss game engine architecture and engineering solutions to development problems. The second piece will go live on Friday this week.

A truncated video can be found below. The remainder of the discussion goes live alongside the Friday content. Note that, unlike most our previous interviews with Roberts, this was conducted over Skype – that means occasional connectivity problems and reduced overall video quality, but the content is still strong. Highlights are in the below editorial content.

Space games have made a bit of a dent in the industry lately. Between Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, Rebel Galaxy, Dreadnought, and others, we’ve seen the industry trend shift toward a revisit to one of the oldest genres. Dreadnought takes a different approach from its space sim counterparts, focusing instead on more FPS-styled obliteration of opposing teams.

We’ve previewed Dreadnought twice now. The first time – PAX South – the game had little competition in the way of other on-site booths, easily ranking it among the best games at the show. We then saw Dreadnought at PAX East about six months ago, where we reported on team elimination gameplay (see: Counter-Strike in space) and remarked that the game had gotten steadily better. That trend hasn’t stopped. Our PAX 2015 hands-on with Dreadnought reveals more gameplay, customization mechanics, and monetization avenues.