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The Last of Us Part I will run on PC, but it still needs some TLC

2K View2023-03-30

If you’ve read a story about The Last of Us Part I’s newly released PC port, odds are good it painted a pretty dire picture. Almost as soon as this new edition of Naughty Dog’s landmark adventure launched, negative Steam reviews started pouring in, complaining of poor performance, long load times, and a multitude of bugs. Social media is awash in images from the PC release that show Joel and Ellie with weirdly angular hair, or inexplicably appearing drenched in the middle of a cutscene. I’m here to tell you that while the port does have some issues, it’s probably not as bad as a sample of today’s posts might indicate.

One of the main issues PC players are running into with The Last of Us Part I is the way the game handles shader caching. Like many modern PC game versions, The Last of Us Part I assembles a big library of shaders—these are, effectively, small programs that run on a graphics card and create effects like texture and shadows and colors. Because of how detailed the world of The Last of Us is, and how lifelike its characters are, this is a game that requires a lot of shaders, and they’re all automatically tailored to the hardware the game is running on.

The Last of Us will begin building its shader cache the first time it’s launched on any PC, and here’s where folks seem to be running into trouble. This process can take a long time—up to an hour, in some cases—and there’s the option to allow it to continue running in the background while you go ahead and play the game. You’ll want to avoid this temptation, however, even if you’ve installed the game on an SSD.

With system resources partially devoted to building a shader library, there will be less available headroom for the game itself to use. This results in a broad range of issues: In my case, I had key cutscenes during the crucial opening sequence grind to a complete halt for a few seconds, and there were countless instances of slowdown and stuttering beyond that. It makes for a pretty bad experience!

Beyond the performance issues caused by shader caching in the background, playing without a complete shader library will make for some pretty gnarly looking graphical issues. These aren’t “bugs” or “glitches,” per se: The game is showing you basically raw geometry because the shader it’s looking for hasn’t been created yet. That’s why you’re seeing screenshots of Ellie with Groucho Marx eyebrows all over the internet today, and why Joel’s beard suddenly looks like a rough-carved lump of coal.

Once I’d waited for the shaders to install, The Last of Us Part I ran fairly smoothly on my PC. On a 1440p ultrawide-screen with an RTX 4070ti and Ryzen 9 3900x, I’m seeing framerates in the upper 50s most of the time while using the Ultra preset, with DLSS set to Balanced. That’s not phenomenal, and it would have been nice to see some built-in benchmarking features and new tech like DLSS 3 frame generation included in this PC edition as well.

On lower presets, performance increases pretty dramatically—even knocking it down one notch to High resulted in noticeably higher FPS, better responsiveness, and improved consistency as well.

This is on some reasonably high-end hardware though, so it’s probably a good idea to take the minimum recommended PC specs listed on the Steam page with a grain or two of salt. Sure, it may technically be possible to run The Last of Us on a GTX 970, but my guess is that it’ll be struggling even on the lowest graphics preset.

It’s clear PlayStation PC and porting studio Iron Galaxy have some work to do to bring The Last of Us up to the high standard of some of the other Sony first-party ports we’ve seen over the past few years. The PC edition of Santa Monica Studio’s God of War was terrific, as was Days Gone. The PC port of Death Stranding is a technical marvel, and has long been used as a showcase for Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0 technology. Horizon Zero Dawn exhibited many of the foibles that The Last of Us does, including sluggish framerates and crashes, but Guerrilla pushed out patches over the first month after launch and managed to right the ship.

Let’s hope Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy can do the same with The Last of Us Part I. In the meantime, it might be wise to hold off for a few weeks, especially if you’re running a mid-range or lower PC.

💬 Have you tried The Last of Us Part I on PC yet? Let me know if you’ve run into problems, or if your time with Ellie and Joel has gone smoothly so far.

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