Coping with The Last of Us on PC has been an adventure

The Last of Us on PC is one of those ports

Before I begin, let me discuss the article I planned to write about The Last of Us on PC.

I agreed to cover the PC port of this game because, somehow, in 2023, I do not know a single thing about The Last of Us. I’ve dodged all story spoilers, and I deliberately avoided the HBO series so I could play this game completely blind. My logic was this would be a refreshing take, especially with the impending decade anniversary of the original game’s release. I even workshopped some jokes about how I was too busy grinding Pokemon effort values at the time to play one of the most critically acclaimed video games ever made.

I mean, what else was I going to talk about? The performance?

Chapter 1: The Performance

In case you haven’t heard, The Last of Us on PC is a mess. It’s a classic case where a critically acclaimed game debuts on Steam with a negative review consensus. We all know what this means; this article now must unfortunately become a technical analysis of The Last of Us. I am about 5% as qualified to talk about these things as some hardware masters; but I do have a pretty new computer to play with, so I have that going for me.

For context, here’s what I’m working with in terms of specs:

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
1TB WD Blue SN550 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
32 GB RAM* (I’ll come back to this)

News of The Last of Us’ nonsense port reached my ears quickly, but I wasn’t too worried at first. Elden Ring was similarly review bombed on launch, but I had still a great time with that port. I’ve also enjoyed the Resident Evil 4 remake on nearly maxed settings, even though the RE Engine has faced criticism for its PC performance.

Maybe The Last of Us will have issues, but I mean, look at my specs! I decided to treat my mid-pandemic depression with one of those fancy graphics cards people couldn’t shut up about, and I’ve only mildly regretted that decision since then. I’ve gotta be able to overpower any issues The Last of Us could have, right?

Chapter 2: Building Shaders (and other things I waited for)

Protip to any of y’all interested in playing The Last of Us on PC, and this is very important: the first thing you want to do is not play it.

Upon loading the game, you are advised to refrain from playing until the shaders have been built. If I had any foresight, I would have immediately run a timer on this step. The Last of Us takes a hilariously long time building shaders, to the point of becoming a meme among people who have played this port. It’s not quite “it takes long enough to disqualify you from a Steam refund” that people have joked, but I do want to say it took a good 40 minutes. I later timed this process on my Steam Deck, and I was surprised to see the Building Shaders Phase™ only took 30 minutes. This is likely due to hotfixes that have since gone live.

Thankfully, you’ll only have to endure this waiting period a single time. I say this waiting period because The Last of Us still subjected me to some of the longest loading times I’ve experienced since I got a Solid State Drive. It takes about 25 seconds to reach the title screen once the game opens. About 50 seconds will elapse between hitting “Continue” and actually entering the game. There aren’t any notable load times once I’m in game, so there’s that.

However, I gotta tell you, I compared these load times to footage of The Last of Us on PS5. Do you know how long the game takes to load on a console? Not 50 seconds, that’s for sure.

Chapter 3: So far so good?

Surprisingly, after jumping through these hoops and finally getting into the game, things seemed… generally okay? The opening cinematic of Joel being a dad with his daughter looked pretty good, and the character models had that crisp polish I would expect from a current-gen game. Even the open sequence where the world immediately goes to hell (spoilers) ran at a pretty stable framerate. Maybe this port isn’t so bad after all!

A few cutscenes later, and I take control of Joel in a deformed world filled witAHHHHHHHHHHH

Chapter 4: AHHHHHHHHHHH

No. No way. I did not pay the money I spent on the hardware I have to look at walls like that. What is this, Super Smash Bros. for the 3DS!? Any immersion I had built up was immediately blown away by this janky PS2-quality wall merely existing in the world of one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. You might be saying to yourself “Tim, it’s just a wall, it’s no big deal.” To that, I say, look at it.

Now, my first thought was that the game may have incorrectly defaulted to “low” settings for some graphics options. The good news is that, indeed, this wall looks so bad because the applicable settings were on low. The bad news is that this was no accident. This wall, in all its horrifying, low-poly horror, was the best the game could do. Nearly 8 GB of VRAM were being consumed so the game could spit out that. I am not a tech guy, but I can confidently say that this wall is the graphical equivalent of the Fyre Festival. This is the only quote that Sony is allowed to use from this article for marketing purposes.

Chapter 5: RAM intermission

At this point, my life was a blur. I decided to upgrade my RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB because… you know what, I don’t even know at this point. I wanted to clean my system anyway to spare it from what The Last of Us was putting it through, so why not make an inexpensive upgrade that will help me with other PC ports? Or maybe my brain just couldn’t process the VRAM consumption and I thought of something RAM-related to cope.

After upgrading my computer, I realized that my machine no longer displayed an image on my monitor. My mind immediately jumped to “I must have jostled a component,” so I made sure my RAM was clicked in firmly and nothing was unplugged by mistake. This happened about 15 minutes before my regularly scheduled Pokemon raid coverage, which triggered a frenzy of frantically finding a backup computer so I could literally do my job.

Afterward, I got my go-to tech guy on the phone and we determined that my issue was that apparently one of the display ports in my 3070 didn’t work. I used the second port and all my problems were resolved. None of this would have happened if I just downloaded my RAM like someone said I should on a forum 20 years ago.

At this point, you might ask yourself “Tim, what does any of this have to do with The Last of Us?”

…

Chapter 6: Configuring The Last of Us

Fortunately, this widely pointless interlude bought the people responsible for this mess enough time to release a few patches. Armed with my extra vanity RAM, I popped back into The Last of Us and messed with the settings.

I kindly asked The Last of Us to allow my feeble NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 to run environmental settings at “Medium,” and thankfully it abided. This writer, unfortunately, pushed his luck and triggered a crash with settings on “High,” so I switched back to Medium and apologized to The Last of Us for being impetuous.

I kept tinkering with other settings and eventually arrived at the best midpoint between graphics and performance. Even in this state, results were not consistent. The framerate jumps between 45 and 85 FPS at will, which feels actively terrible in action. I can’t explain this other than saying that the controls feel like they chug, subtly enough to not ruin the game but obvious enough to be noticeable.

While the walls, thankfully, don’t look like total messes anymore, the game still oscillates between impressive scenery and terrible assets at will. I’ve never been bothered by stuff like trees in Pokemon, but at least the art is generally consistent there. Here, the genuinely beautiful scenery juxtaposed with terrible assets actively prevents any immersion in The Last of Us. To be fair, I haven’t seen more crashes or major bugs that have made the rounds on social media. However, I think it’s reasonable to hold a port of “the winner of over 200 Game of the Year awards” to a higher standard than “it works.”

Chapter 7: Does The Last of Us PC run on Steam Deck?

Lmao.

Chapter 8: Final thoughts on… okay fine I’ll talk about the Steam Deck

In the event that you wanted to try The Last of Us on Steam Deck… I mean, your console won’t explode, so there’s that. It does run, and I was able to progress the story, but I wouldn’t recommend playing the game this way.

With every single setting set as low as possible, The Last of Us maybe hits 33 FPS max on Steam Deck. To compare, I recently played Resident Evil 4 Remake on the Steam Deck and have had a surprisingly good time with it. That game never dips below 40 FPS for me, and the controls are smooth to the touch. Meanwhile, The Last of Us on Steam Deck has the same feeling that a poor Nintendo Switch port of a PS4 game does. If you really want to play The Last of Us and you only own a Steam Deck, I guess you could manage to play the game like this. It’d pale in comparison to other experiences you could have on your system, but it’s an option I suppose.

In case this meager endorsement is enough to pique your interest, I should warn that I only tested The Last of Us on the Deck for maybe 20-30 minutes in low impact areas of the game. This thing could dip into the 20s range had I played some of the sections that dropped my desktop to 45 FPS. Whereas I generally recommend something like the Resident Evil 4 remake, I really wouldn’t recommend this.

Chapter 9: Final thoughts on The Last of Us

After all this, probably the most messed up part about The Last of Us on PC is that I’m still basically enjoying it.

Yes, the issues surrounding this port are ridiculous. But damn if the underlying game isn’t good. Maybe it’s because I am playing this game blind, but I’m enjoying Joel and Ellie’s journey in this terrible world. I’m even used to the quirks, so the occasional terrible asset has bothered me less and less.

There has been a lot of discourse surrounding The Last of Us on PC. Many on the Steam forums complain that people shouldn’t expect this game to run well on a “potato” computer. Others still blame NVIDIA for skimping on VRAM for its latest hardware. Still, I can’t help but go back to the Resident Evil 4 remake. It looks better, runs better, and plays better than The Last of Us by every objective measure. I can respect the opinion that I made a bad choice by buying a 3070. But no matter how you slice it, no other game has taxed my system so hard to produce this.

Optimistically, The Last of Us will receive patches that address its performance. And maybe in the future, better hardware will make The Last of Us look spectacular despite its poor optimization. For now, this PC port feels like a commercial for the PS5 version of the game that costs $60. The Last of Us could have been a gift for an audience who never had the chance to play it. Unfortunately, even if the underlying game is classic, I’m still wondering why I stopped grinding effort values in Pokemon to deal with this.

Chapter 10: An optimistic epilogue

Originally, Chapter 9 was the end of this piece. However, in the time it has taken to write and edit this, The Last of Us has seen further updates. I suppose I am proud to say that the game runs noticeably better for me now.

Sure, loading times are still ridiculously long, and I did have a crash at the title screen. Plus the game looked like this at first.

However! Once I reloaded, I instantly noticed that the game looked a lot better and maintained a relatively stable framerate. I poked into my settings and noticed the game defaulted almost everything to “high” or “ultra,” but even though it claimed to tax my VRAM, I had stable performance for a good three hours. I had the occasional dip to 45 FPS, but compared to my previous experiences, the difference was enormous.

I’m not ready to redact what I wrote. As mentioned, I still had issues that I haven’t seen in other games. It’s also possible that I was playing sections that just ran better, and I can’t bring myself to keep testing this game. As it is, I already gave the developers a week to roll out patches that I could account for. Additionally, I don’t think anyone deserves accolades for fixing something that shouldn’t have been broken to begin with.

That said, it would be unfair of me to ignore that the game is a little bit better now. I’d still hold out for more updates if you want to grab this port, but at least The Last of Us could, eventually, be a good experience on the right hardware. I changed my mind, Sony can use that sentence for marketing purposes too.