Best No Man's Sky Settings on the Steam Deck
No Man's Sky is Deck Verified and holds around 45 fps (community-measured). The frame cap, the graphics settings worth trimming, FSR, and battery tips.
Short version: No Man's Sky is Deck Verified and runs well out of the box on the Steam Deck — community reports put it around 45 fps at the default resolution. It will not hold a locked 60, but it is one of the better-scaling open-world games on this hardware. A short list of changes buys you steadier frame pacing and a longer battery without gutting how it looks.
A note on honesty: the 45 fps above is community-measured — real Deck sessions reported to deck-verified.games at the default resolution, from a small sample of two. It is not a benchmark we ran. Treat it as a ballpark, not a lab number: it moves with planet type, base complexity, and weather. The settings guidance below is general Deck practice for this game's known heavy options, not a claim about how many frames each change is worth.
Start with the Deck defaults
No Man's Sky applies a sensible profile when it detects Steam Deck hardware, so you are not starting from zero. Launch it once, let that profile land, then open Options → Graphics and check the baseline:
- Resolution: native 800p (1280×800). Leave it here and let upscaling do the work rather than dropping the render resolution by hand.
- Display Mode: Fullscreen.
- V-Sync: Off. You are going to cap frames with the Deck's own limiter, which paces better and adds less latency than in-game vsync on top of it.
Cap the frame rate
The measured average is 45, so cap under it. 40 fps at a matching 40 Hz refresh gives every frame the same on-screen time, which reads as smoother than a number bouncing between 38 and 50 depending on what planet you landed on. That 40 Hz step is the LCD's (40–60 Hz); the OLED's slider starts at 45 Hz, so use 45 fps at 45 Hz there.
- Open Quick Access (the … button) → Performance.
- Turn on Use per-game profile.
- Set Framerate Limit to 40 fps (45 fps on the OLED).
- Set Refresh Rate to 40 Hz (45 Hz on the OLED).
The settings that matter most
No Man's Sky's heaviest costs on Deck are the usual ones for a modest GPU: draw distance, scene density, and post-processing. Trim these and leave the rest alone.
- Generation Detail: Medium. The single biggest lever — it controls how much procedural terrain and scatter gets streamed and drawn, so pulling it back cuts GPU load and streaming hitches at once.
- Shadow Detail: Medium or Low. Shadows are expensive relative to what you can pick out on a 7-inch screen.
- Base Complexity: Medium or Low. Big player bases and busy settlements are some of the heaviest scenes in the game, and this is what caps their cost.
- Volumetric Effects Quality: Medium. Atmospheric planets with thick cloud layers are the other demanding scene type.
- Reflection Quality: Medium.
- Anti-Aliasing: keep it on (TAA). No Man's Sky's procedural geometry shimmers badly without it.
- Motion Blur: Off. Taste, and a free saving when you are flying at speed.
Leave Texture Quality in the middle. The Deck's 16 GB of unified memory handles textures fine at 800p, and they are not where your frame-time problems come from.
FSR
No Man's Sky ships with AMD FSR in its graphics options. Turn it on at FSR Quality — the GPU renders at a lower internal resolution and FSR reconstructs the image, which is the most effective single way to claw back headroom around space stations, settlements, and freighter combat. Drop to FSR Balanced if those spots still fall under your cap.
Battery and TDP tips
The frame cap is the biggest battery win; power tuning is the follow-up.
- TDP Limit: try a manual 10–12 W and step down while watching for stutter on planet transitions. This is not a CPU-hungry game outside dense settlements, so there is usually room below the Deck's 15 W ceiling.
- GPU Clock: leave it automatic unless you are chasing the last bit of consistency.
- Screen brightness: lower it. Between bright deserts, dark caves, and deep space, this game rarely needs the panel maxed for a whole session.
For more, the No Man's Sky game page has the full compatibility picture across all three Valve devices, the Steam Deck hub covers the hardware, and the adventure genre hub has more titles that hold up in handheld play.
Frequently asked
Yes. It carries a Deck-Verified badge and applies a sensible graphics profile automatically when it detects Steam Deck hardware. You can play it well without touching a setting; the changes above make it steadier.
Community reports put it around 45 fps at the default resolution — real player sessions, not a benchmark we ran, from a small sample. It is not a locked number: it moves with planet type, weather, and how busy the scene is, which is why capping at 40 fps makes it feel steadier than the raw average suggests.
Yes. FSR is in the game's own graphics menu, and letting the GPU render at a lower internal resolution while FSR reconstructs the image is the cheapest headroom you can buy in busy settlements and space combat.
Yes. Nothing here depends on OLED-only features — the in-game settings, FSR, and the TDP tuning all apply to the LCD model, and the 40 Hz refresh step is the LCD's own (the OLED is the model that has to use 45 fps / 45 Hz instead). You are just working with a smaller battery, so the cap and TDP tips matter a bit more for session length.