If planets in No Man’s Sky judder and freeze as you drop through the atmosphere, you don’t have a bad PC — you have one specific setting fighting your CPU. Terrain Tessellation is the setting most consistently tied to planet-approach stutter across player reports, not the more obvious-sounding graphics sliders like Shadow Quality or Reflections. Set it to Standard and most affected systems stop stuttering almost entirely.
This guide covers the full settings breakdown for the September 2026 Cosmos update (version 7.0), GPU-tier presets, DLSS/FSR upscaling, and the one config-file tweak that fixes stutter Terrain Tessellation alone doesn’t catch. Verified on Cosmos 7.04 (hotfix), September 2026. Individual setting names and defaults may shift in future patches — check the in-game Graphics Options menu against this list before assuming an option has moved.
This is one game in a much bigger settings puzzle — for the universal levers (drivers, Windows power settings, upscaling basics) that apply no matter what you’re playing, see our PC game settings optimization guide.
Quick Start: Fix Stutter First, Then Optimize
Do these five things in order before touching anything else:
- Set Terrain Tessellation to Standard (this alone resolves most planet-approach stutter)
- Set Planet Quality to Enhanced instead of Ultra — the second-biggest stutter contributor
- Turn on your GPU’s upscaler (DLSS, FSR, or XeSS) before touching any quality slider — it’s the single cheapest FPS gain in the game
- Drop Motion Blur from its default strength (around 180) to the 40–50 range — free clarity, zero FPS cost
- If stutter persists after the above, apply the NumLowThreads config-file fix below
What Changed in the Cosmos Update
Hello Games shipped Cosmos (version 7.0) on September 9, 2026 — Hello Games’ own announcement calls it the biggest overhaul to the game’s universe in ten years, adding asteroid belts, space hulks, orbital bases, and space station ownership. None of that changes the graphics menu directly, but it does mean more geometry rendering in space and near planetary orbit than in previous versions — which raises the stakes on getting Terrain Tessellation and Planet Quality right if you were already stutter-prone before the update.
Separately, update 6.2 (“Remnant”) added support for DLSS 4.5 back in February 2026, per patch notes compiled by DSOGaming, alongside tiled lighting and multi-threaded rendering improvements. That upscaler version is still current as of Cosmos 7.04.
The Setting Most Responsible for Planet Stutter
No Man’s Sky doesn’t have a literal “render distance” slider — the setting doing that job is Terrain Tessellation, which controls how much real geometric detail the engine generates on a planet’s surface as you approach it, layered on top of Planet Quality, which governs generation detail and object density. Tessellation is the heavier of the two for stutter specifically, because it forces the CPU to recompute terrain geometry in real time as you close distance on a planet, rather than just swapping in higher-resolution textures.
Two independently reported player threads on the game’s Steam Community hub, cross-checked against each other rather than taken at face value, both land on the same fix: setting Terrain Tessellation to Standard (which disables it) removes the vast majority of planet-approach stutter — one player reported roughly a 90% reduction, another called it “the final thing that removed stutter on planets completely.” Neither is an official Hello Games statement, so treat it as strong community consensus, not a confirmed engine fact. The trade-off is visual: some players find Standard terrain noticeably flatter on vegetation-heavy worlds, others say the difference is barely visible outside of screenshots. If you’re stutter-free already, there’s no reason to touch it.
Full Settings Breakdown
Across the current settings menu, three sliders consistently cost the most performance, and two cost almost nothing — upscaling and texture quality do more for your frame time than any single quality slider, so enable your GPU’s upscaler before you touch anything below.
| Setting | FPS Impact | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Terrain Tessellation | High — biggest single stutter cause | Standard, unless you’re already stutter-free |
| Planet Quality | High | Enhanced (Ultra is a small visual gain for a real FPS cost) |
| GTAO (ambient occlusion) | Medium-High | Standard on mid-range GPUs, High/Ultra only if you have frames to spare |
| Volumetric Effects / Reflections | Medium | Medium — clouds, fog, and water reflections rarely justify Ultra’s cost |
| Shadow Quality | Medium | High is close to Ultra visually for noticeably less cost |
| Texture Quality | Low | Ultra if you have 8GB+ VRAM — cheap on FPS, expensive on VRAM instead |
| Anisotropic Filtering | Negligible | x16 — sharper distant textures at almost no cost |
| Motion Blur / Post-Processing | Negligible | Personal taste; lower Motion Blur for clarity, it’s not a performance setting |
Two settings in this list have real measured numbers behind them rather than just a ranking: switching Cloud Quality from Ultra to High is worth roughly 10–12% FPS with almost no visible difference, and enabling Tiled Lighting is worth 15–25% smoother performance specifically in base-building and space-station scenes with lots of light sources, per a dedicated 6.2 performance breakdown.
GPU Tier Presets
Rough hardware targets across three tiers, drawn from a settings-guide roundup rather than a single lab-tested benchmark run — treat these as starting points, not guarantees, and adjust from there.
| Tier | Example GPUs | Realistic Target |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | GTX 1660, RX 6600 | 60 FPS at 1080p, upscaler on, Terrain Tessellation Standard |
| Mid-range | RTX 3060, RX 7600 | 60–90 FPS at 1440p, Planet Quality Enhanced |
| High-end | RTX 4080/5080, RX 8900 XT | 120+ FPS at 4K, most sliders can stay Ultra |
A word on “X FPS on your GPU” numbers you’ll see elsewhere: several popular settings tools generate their per-GPU FPS figures from a hardware-tier model — hardware class multiplied by generic per-setting weights — not from an actual play session. One such tool discloses this directly in its own fine print. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not a benchmark either, and most sites presenting these numbers don’t tell you which kind you’re getting. Treat any specific “117 FPS on an RTX 3060” claim you find online as a modeled estimate unless the source says otherwise.
Upscaling: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS
Turn on your GPU’s upscaler before touching any quality slider — it’s consistently the single cheapest FPS gain in the game, more than dropping Terrain Tessellation or Planet Quality on their own. No Man’s Sky supports all three major upscalers: DLSS 4.5 on RTX cards (added in update 6.2, February 2026), FSR for AMD and cross-vendor use, and XeSS on Intel Arc. If you’re on Nvidia hardware, pair your in-game upscaler choice with the driver-level tuning in our NVIDIA Control Panel best settings guide — Low Latency Mode and the right power-management setting stack with DLSS rather than duplicating it.
VSync and Frame Pacing
No Man’s Sky’s VSync interacts with frame generation and high-refresh monitors in ways that have caused real stutter in past patches — update 6.2’s patch notes specifically called out fixing Frame Generation conflicts with Steam Overlay, HDR10+, and high-refresh HDR displays, which suggests this combination was unstable before. If you’re unsure whether to run VSync on or off for this game specifically, our VSync on or off explainer covers the general tradeoff in more depth than fits here — the short version for No Man’s Sky is that an uncapped frame rate with VSync off and a frame-rate cap set slightly under your monitor’s refresh rate avoids tearing without adding input lag.
Settings by Player Type
| Player Type | Priority |
|---|---|
| New player | Leave everything on the default High preset until you actually see stutter — don’t pre-optimize a problem you don’t have yet |
| Casual player | Terrain Tessellation to Standard, upscaler on, leave the rest alone — two changes cover most of the stutter fix for the least effort |
| Hardcore / optimizer | Full table above plus the NumLowThreads config-file tweak; benchmark your own approach sequence rather than trusting a generic FPS number |
| Completionist / screenshot player | Keep Planet Quality and Volumetric Effects high for base-building and photo-mode shots; only drop Terrain Tessellation if stutter is actually a problem for you |
Base and Space Station Performance
Cosmos leans hard into space — orbital bases, space station ownership, and asteroid-belt outposts all mean more light sources and more built structures rendering at once than the base game’s planetside focus assumed. That’s exactly where Tiled Lighting matters: it changes how the engine groups and culls light sources instead of calculating every light against every surface individually, and it’s worth 15–25% smoother performance specifically in base-building and space-station scenes with lots of lamps, screens, and light-emitting parts, per the same 6.2 performance breakdown cited above. If you build large bases or plan to own multiple space stations under Cosmos’s new ownership system, confirm this setting is on before assuming your base-building stutter is a Terrain Tessellation problem — it isn’t the same bottleneck, and the fix is different.
Fixing Stutter the Settings Menu Can’t: NumLowThreads
If Terrain Tessellation and Planet Quality are already set low and you’re still getting rubberbanding or freezes, the remaining fix lives outside the in-game menu, in the TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS config file in the game’s installation directory. Two independently reported Steam Community threads, testing on different hardware (an i5-6600K/GTX 1070 system in one case), both converge on setting NumHighThreads and NumLowThreads to "0" as the change that eliminated freezing and rubberbanding for them. This is an unsupported, community-discovered tweak, not something Hello Games documents or endorses — back up the file before editing it, and treat any report of it “breaking” other things as a real possibility, not just caution language.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does lowering Planet Quality actually reduce flora and mineral density?
Yes, slightly, at Enhanced versus Ultra — but the density loss is minor compared to the FPS you get back, and it doesn’t affect resource totals, only how much renders on screen at once. If you’re optimizing for mining efficiency rather than performance, this is one of the few settings worth leaving on Ultra even if you drop everything else.
Is it worth editing the TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS config file if the in-game settings already fixed my stutter?
No. The config-file tweak is a fallback for stutter the Terrain Tessellation and Planet Quality changes don’t catch, not a first step. Editing config files you don’t need to touch adds a variable you’ll have to remember and undo later, for no benefit if you’re already smooth.
Should I use DLSS Quality or Balanced in No Man’s Sky?
Balanced if you’re already hitting your target frame rate on Quality — the image-quality gap between the two is smaller in this game’s softer, more painterly art style than it is in a hard-edged realistic shooter, so you’re less likely to notice the difference Balanced trades away.
Sources
- Hello Games. No Man’s Sky: Cosmos. Official No Man’s Sky site
- DSOGaming. No Man’s Sky Update 6.2 “Remnant” Released — Full Patch Notes
- Tutorial.Games. No Man’s Sky: Best PC Settings and Graphics Guide for Cosmos
- DTGre. No Man’s Sky 6.2 Performance Guide: Best Settings for PC, PS5
- FrameCoach. Best No Man’s Sky Settings for NVIDIA RTX 3060 (12GB)
- Steam Community. No Man’s Sky — FPS / Stuttering Fix discussion
- Steam Community. No Man’s Sky — Possible Fix for Massive Stuttering Near and On Planets discussion
- Steam Community. No Man’s Sky — Stuttering on Planets discussion
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.