Yeah, it compiled system files/shaders on every launch. I'm honestly surprised they coded the game to do that instead of storing the shaders after first launch, though I suppose it's to account for newer drivers possibly changing the shader pipeline. I think I ran it off my M.2 drive, loading times to get in-game were around 5 minutes and nearly all of that was shader compile.

I haven't overclocked my CPU or GPU, but I have enabled the XMP equivalent on my RAM. That still only brings it up to 32GB@3200MHz.

Bought and launched through Steam.

And optimizing for PC is HARD. There's countless permutations of hardware. As a developer you can aim for the median configuration, the rig built of all the most common components, but what do you do when that's just not enough oomph to run the game well? Hell, there's variability even among the same components. CPUs of the same model can ramp up to higher or lower boost speeds due to minute imperfections in the silicon. Someone else, who got the same RAM sticks as I did, might find that their system becomes unstable at 3000MHz. As the components get more and more intricate, such tiny faults can have mounting effects on overall performance.

[–] Transcendant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately my reply seemed to get eaten by the gremlins! Take two.

I made 4 or 5 changes at once so I'm not exactly sure which alteration fixed things for me; I saw advice on a forum post about this game crashing that said essentially, you might think you've got a stable OC, but then a game can push it and breach your 'safe' levels. I switched off my OCing, and touch wood have had no crashes since; I turned off ray tracing also, but have since turned that back on and again managed to play a complete session and exit to windows. Other things I changed, in case someone else is reading this looking for help:

manually set the page file size for the drive it's installed on (25gb)
turned off v-sync in game options, used the 'fast' setting on Nvidia Control Panel
set 'Anti-alias' to 'off' in Nvidia Control Panel

Like you say, optimising any program for PC is very difficult... so I'm always willing to give some benefit of the doubt with games that push the envelope. This has probably been the least-pro experience since the launch of No Man's Sky (which as it goes, is imo an excellent game now), AAA studios should be aiminig higher than tiny startups when it comes to stability!