The Last of Us Part I PC Improves Textures and CPU Usage, But New Stutters Have Beed Added

As we’ve covered rather extensively, the PC version of The Last of Us Part I was a bit of a mess when it launched back in March, featuring shaky performance, poor visual quality on mid-level hardware, and, of course, plenty of bugs. Since then, Naughty Dog and PC port developer Iron Galaxy have been busily putting out patches, but have they actually improved the experience?

Well, the tech heads at Digital Foundry have taken a fresh look at The Last of Us Part I, and, long story short, things are better, but they’re still far from perfect. In fact, some fresh new issues have been introduced. If you have around 15 minutes to spare, you can check out Digital Foundry’s full recap below, or scroll on down for our recap of the key points.

Starting with the good news, The Last of Us Part I on PC has seemingly had its textures completely revamped. Not only do they look a lot nicer at medium settings and below, but they also gobble up less VRAM (around 1.5 GB less on average, regardless of settings). This means 8 GB GPUs can now run a fairly decent-looking version of the game. Overall, CPU usage has also improved by around 10 percent on average, although GPU usage is about the same. This means you’ll be seeing somewhat better, but still not remarkable, performance (an RTX 2070 Super will run the game at mid-40 to low-50fps at 1440p and high settings). Background streaming stutters are also still an issue.

Speaking of stutters, Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy have shortened the amount of time you have to wait for shaders to compile when playing The Last of Us Part I for the first time (around 25 minutes compared to over 40 in the past) but it seems to come at a cost. Yes, the game now has shader compilation stutters. Not as bad as some other recent PC games, but still pretty noticeable at times. Combine this with the continued existence of various bugs, and you have a game that’s now at least playable, but still far from ideal or up to the same level of polish as the PS5 version. Whether The Last of Us Part I ever gets to that place on PC remains to be seen.

The Last of Us Part I can be played on PC and PS5.

Written by Nathan Birch