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No Man's Sky recently had an absolutely ridiculous update to add in tons of new features and greatly expanded multiplayer. This update also added in Vulkan support too!

It seems Hello Games are keeping an eye on Steam Play as well, with a recent update changelog noting "Fixed Steam VR in Linux.". Quite interesting! However, there is a bit of a problem for NVIDIA users with Steam Play on Linux, with the game performing quite poorly. Although, there's a slightly amusing workaround.

If you spoof your GPU vendor to look like AMD, the game performance will skyrocket. Do any of the below at your own risk. Since I am posting all this, I have of course tested it myself and it's great for me.

Credit to user volca02 who posted an easy to use GitHub repository to quickly enable this spoof. Doing it takes a little command line work but it's easy enough to do. You may need to install some additional packages to get it compiled like build-essential and git on Ubuntu for example "sudo apt install build-essential git".

Instructions:

git clone https://github.com/volca02/spoof_vendorid
cd spoof_vendorid
cmake ./
make

What does the above do? It pulls the GitHub files, changes into the directory downloaded and then compiles it into the files you need. After, you can make a folder to keep the files somewhere handy like:

mkdir $HOME/nmsfix

Then just copy the two needed files over to the nmsfix folder made above:

cp -t $HOME/nmsfix libVkLayer_vendorid_layer.so VkLayer_vendorid_layer.json

You will then need to set a launch option for No Man's Sky on Steam, like this one:

VK_LAYER_PATH=/home/liam/nmsfix/ VK_INSTANCE_LAYERS=VK_LAYER_LUNARG_vendorid_layer %command%

To do the above, right click on No Man's Sky in Steam -> Properties -> Set Launch Options… and enter the line above in with VK_LAYER_PATH pointing to where you put the files.

It made my frame rate on an NVIDIA 980ti go from a sluggish 40FPS and under to well over an enjoyable 80FPS most of the time. There's a few dips here and there depending on what's around you, but it's a big improvement.


Pictured: No Man's Sky running on Linux+NVIDIA with the above workaround.

From what I saw an NVIDIA rep say, they've confirmed this is an "application bug" and so it needs Hello Games to fix it. Hopefully with this post bringing some more attention to it, more of you can enjoy No Man's Sky on Linux with Steam Play until the main issue is solved in the game. Who knows, maybe they will support Linux officially one day.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Zelox Aug 23, 2019
I crash when I enter my ship in some area. Did that with Nvidia now also with amd. I also got worse performance after this update. But there have been som small patches so it might been fixed :)


Last edited by Zelox on 23 August 2019 at 10:16 pm UTC
CalebQ42 Aug 24, 2019
It seems the Nvidia issue is fixed on the expiremental branch. I disabled the workaround and am getting similiar, if not better FPS in game and it seems to be using all of my vram instead of just 1.5 Gigs.
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