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It's pretty obvious by this point that No Man's Sky has several clear advantages on PC over its PS4 stablemate. In the best case, it gets an expected push from 30fps to 60fps (and beyond), a vastly widened field of view, plus a clearer 16x anisotropic filtering pass for textures - with a bit of fiddling. With a slight reduction to terrain pop-in too, it's undoubtedly a better-looking game, though perhaps not the radical improvement PC gamers might have hoped for. It's not all plain sailing though. Stuttering frame-rates and even crashes, are still a problem on certain setups. However, PC offers some enhancements to sweeten the deal, and while differences in shadow and texture quality are moot, the advances in overall presentation stand out. For example, tweaking the field of view slider from the default 75 value (as used on PS4) to 100 helps remove a very restrictive cone of vision. Going one further, editing the game's .ini file in the game's Steam directory lets us push this out to 140 - maximising that periphery, at the expense of introducing a fishbowl effect.
Texture filtering also gets a noticeable boost, with the right tweaks. Sadly, even with the arrival of the latest patch, the in-game setting doesn't show much of a difference between 2x and 16x settings right now - a blurry implementation regardless of what you choose, and one that matches PS4 closely. The good news is you can force the issue with your GPU's control panel; for example, Nvidia users can override the game's setting with its own 16x anisotropic filtering. This gets great results, and textures appear far cleaner at tight angles than the stock PC or PS4 settings.
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