The Frame Rate of Us.
Naughty Dog’s much-heralded The Last of Us Part 1 released on PC in March and unusually for this studio, and despite a last-minute delay, launched in poor shape. Players reported widespread problems with the port including frame drops, stuttering, poor optimisation throughout, and regular crashes. For any game this would be a shoddy state to launch in, but for one with a reputation like this it felt like a return to the bad old days.
Developer Naughty Dog has, however, been beavering away since launch and has just released a fourth major patch for the game, which clocks in at about 25GB, and includes “framerate optimization, graphical and texture fidelity, crash fixes, and more.” The studio adds that it will be “releasing additional CPU optimization, framerate and texture fidelity improvements in upcoming patches.”
If you haven’t yet tried The Last of Us on PC, it may be wise to hold off on it for now. Naughty Dog’s clearly hard at work on things, but it’s also firefighting and, while some players are now finding the game runs acceptably, for others it remains a little borked. In PC Gamer’s review Phil Iwaniuk lamented that he’d been expecting the definitive version of a classic with this PC version: “Instead, it’s a battle against a shader cache that takes longer to load than even the most un-optimised console emulator you’ve downloaded from the darkest corners of retro gaming internet forums. There are reviews on the game’s Steam page that claim the two-hour refund period expired before it had finished building its shaders, and they’re not joking.”
Oh well: At least we got some great bugs out of it.
The full list of changes follow, and Naughty Dog says it’s “closely watching player reports to support future improvements”. The studio responded to the initial negative reaction from players with something of a mea culpa about the port not hitting “the Naughty Dog quality you expected“, which is as close as it’ll come to saying we know we screwed the pooch, please be patient while we try to unscrew it.
Optimized CPU and GPU use throughout the gameImproved texture fidelity and resolution on in-game Low and Medium settingsImproved graphical fidelity on the in-game Low graphics preset, particularly water surfaces no longer appear blackFixed a crash that may occur during shader buildingFixed a crash that may occur when quitting to the Main MenuFixed a crash that may occur when dying after combatFixed an issue where, on first boot, players may experience longer wait times to load into the gameAdded an option for players to lock and unlock performance stats simultaneously in the HUD menu (Options > HUD)Added descriptions in the Graphics menus to better explain when certain settings may affect another (Options > Display)Added a Texture Streaming Rate setting (Graphics > Texture Settings)Fixed an issue where skipping cutscenes during a critical load may cause the game to hangFixed an issue where the shader load warning did not appear while relaunching the gameUpdated the VRAM bar to more accurately display the OS+Apps usageFixed an issue where the Screen Reader read values for locked settings which may imply those same locked setting were activeFixed an issue where aiming downward while using keyboard and mouse (KBM) may increase camera sensitivityRefined the handling of certain commands that are assigned the same KBM keybindingCorrected Brazilian Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, LATAM Spanish, Spanish, Thai, and Traditional Chinese translations for multiple menu options[Ultrawide Displays] Corrected the Rangefinder reticle position for the bowFixed a crash that may occur on AMD CPUs with affinity limited to X3D coresFixed an issue where textures may render incorrectly on AMD GPUsFixed an issue where the “It Can’t Be For Nothing” achievement did not trigger, despite acquiring all other achievementsFixed an issue on Steam Deck where resetting Display settings to Default no longer enabled AMD FSR 2 (Options > Display)
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