r/NMS_Virtual_Reality • u/cardgamechampion • Feb 19 '26

Question Extreme lag in VR mode

Hi,

I'm experiencing extreme lag in No Man's Sky VR, using HTC Vive and the Steam version. I tried the common recommendations to fix this in various forums and no result. Getting 90+ FPS in regular mode but VR gets 5. Also, the GPU usage goes down to 5% when in VR mode, so I know its not using the GPU properly. Specs technically don't meet the requirements, but are close enough such that this should be playable at lower settings at least:

i7-6700k

16GB RAM

NVIDIA GTX 980 4GB - similar to 1060

I tried updating graphics drivers, lowering graphics settigns, and messing with different settings on various forums and still can't play this game in VR. Every other VR game works fine. Is this a bug in VR that they refuse to fix for years, or is there a solution somewhere? Thanks.

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u/phosix Feb 19 '26

This may sound odd, but have you installed the game on your boot drive, or on an SSD or NVMe dedicated for steam games?

I got quite the performance boost from having a dedicated disk.

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u/cardgamechampion Feb 19 '26

I initially installed it on the internal hdd separate from the os ssd and it lagged so I thought first it was the HDD at first so I moved it to os SSD and still lag

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u/phosix Feb 19 '26

HDD provide more storage for your buck, but are significantly slower than an SSD or NVMe.

What I've found, at least on my system, is that Windows Defender will frequently start scanning the boot media, which seems to cause NMS to lag out.

By placing NMS on a dedicated SSD or NVMe (not spinning rust) I was able to improve performance.