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The Last of Us PC - Honest Review and Performance Test
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Back in the day, when it first came out, I absolutely loved The Last of Us. The storytelling and the atmosphere was and still is one of the best out there. When I heard it was also coming out on PC, I was of course over the moon.
Well... as many of you know, the launch was terrible and the game was clearly still not complete. I feel like this MUST be taken into consideration whenever anyone is commenting on this PC port. The bad performance and the glitches were not an "accidental mistake", it was an intentional decision by the publishers and the higher-ups to release the game at that state and hope people will still buy it and forget about it after a while.
Let me tell you guys, for a title this big and with a price even above some brand new titles, how they launched this game was totally unacceptable and that should not ever be "forgotten" by the fans and community.
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So, now to my experience. I haven't preordered this game or bought it any time close to launch. The version I bought it at and am currently running is v1.1.2. I do not recommend getting this game without it going on sale. The specs I have tested it on are:
- windows 11 22h2
- ryzen 5 5600x
- rtx 3060 (driver 537.13)
- 32gb ram (ddr4)
The Steam download is around 75gb. As soon as you launch the game, it will automatically start building the shaders. This means it will instantly max out your cpu until the shaders for the main game and the dlc are built. With these specs, it took around 20 minutes to finish and the cpu maxed out at around 70°c. There are people who have experienced system shutdowns because of high cpu temperatures. If you have such concerns, you can always edit your power plan or disable turbo boost on amd systems. I highly recommend waiting for the shaders to fully build before doing anything.
For the display and graphics settings, a quick google search for "the last of us pc optimal settings" will give you many websites with detailed explanations on what each setting does. For this test I have used the guide from a website called exputer and made some small tweaks. Some settings have little impact on the visuals but a big impact on the performance. With these settings the visuals look great and the performance is optimal as well.
In the first two hours of gameplay the game ran on average at around 80 fps with dlss balanced and vsync off. I haven't experienced major stutters or graphical glitches. The average total hardware utilisations were around:
- cpu 60%
- vram 8gb
- ram 16gb
However, not all scenes are the same. Some are lighter to run and some are heavier to run. I would consider the overall experience to be smooth and playable.
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If you happen to have the exact specs and drivers as I have, then I do recommend getting this game only on a sale. Although not guaranteed, you likely should not experience major problems.
Even though I had a great experience with the game performance, that does not make any other recent complaints invalid. Some systems are still clearly having problems, regardless of whether they have the recommended specs or not. This is certainly not their fault, but rather the game's fault. I absolutely do not recommend buying the game without checking whether you have any known issues with your hardware. With all things taken into consideration, I would not recommend this game to most people due to performance issues.
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Edit: After finishing the main game, here is some additional information about the performance.
- Overall it was a smooth experience, however towards the end of the game there were sections where the frame rate dropped to low 40s and one section where the frame rate was in the low 30s. Other sections were smooth as mentioned before.
- There was one time in the early game where the game froze up and resulted in me having to restart the game.
Other than that I haven't experienced any new major issues.