[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

Yesterday, The Last of Us™ Part I was released. I think. It is all very strange, I was looking forward to this release since I saw it in @Saka's thread about March releases, but...something seems to be wrong?

The Last of Us™ Part I Steam page details that the game currently "only supports Japanese interface/voice for customers in Japan." And it does not end there: yesterday it had around 200+ reviews and was, I think, Positive on average (though I may be wrong), and today it is "Mostly Negative" with over 6K reviews. People report it was not optimized and ported well, and frequently crashes.

It is all very confusing, and a bit disconcerting, not to mention we already have Diablo IV Beta to worry about. And to make matters worse, it is hard to find reliable info about what is happening.

It makes me worried as I was very much looking forward to this game, never played The Last of Us Does before. Now I do not know what to think. Does anyone know what is going on with that game?

[Saka]

Oh dear.



On a side note, something is going on with the forums lately, when posting pictures they show up as blank squares in the post preview.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Oh my. Quoting Alice, "curiouser and curiouser!"...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch There have been some patches and the situation got a little better. This video tells about the current state of things:



TL;DW: People with 8GB VRAM cards can rejoice, the game is playable. They also increased the quality of textures on medium setting to no longer look like early PS3 games. There are still some issues though.

Before you even can start playing, there's a pre-compilation of the shaders. It used to take almost 45 minutes with a Ryzen 3600, now that time was down to 25 minutes. Obviously, it will get bit better with more powerful CPUs, but not that much. Furthermore, some shaders appear to be missing in the pre-compilation and that causes stutter in cutscenes that's fairly noticeable. The stutter would be gone on second playthrough, as the shader would be compiled by then, but if you nuke the drivers or change the cards, that would be gone again. This issue wasn't there before the patch.

The textures weigh less and have higher fidelity than before, so the game looks significantly better. The low and medium textures were originally very blurry while still taking up a huge amount of memory. The update reduced the VRAM usage by about 20% while improving the quality. The game still looks quite disappointing with medium settings though, and PS5 version is running settings equivalent to high at 1440p. The performance side to side is about 50% better compared to a PC running RTX 2070 super with a Ryzen 5 3600. It's not an issue with the hardware on the PC lacking, but just poor optimization. The game runs a lot worse than most titles with similar level of graphics.

There's still an issue with CPU performance, even super high end processors get absolutely choked in some areas. The patch alleviated it a little, but not enough, and there are sudden dips that can ruin the experience for more sensitive people. Processors without hyperthreading/SMT also seem to suffer from odd stuttering. E-cores in the latest Intel processors also seem to cause some performance issues in the games, although not dramatically.

Finally, DLSS and FSR suffer from some bugs with the shadows not being rendered correctly and/or misplaced textures.

It looks like this game has still a long way to go to be considered a good experience. Hopefully, this isn't the end of the updates and that eventually the performance would be ironed out.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka A way to go indeed. I would not play it yet the way it is now, even with all those improvements.

And I do share your concern about hoping that the updates will not stop here, the game clearly needs more work. Though to get an idea, it could be interesting to look into how other games are doing. As you pointed out before, this year has been plagued with a lack of optimization so far.

When thinking about games optimized for PC, I guess the first one with problems on this scale was UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves. That one had more than a year to get itself in shape by now, I wonder how it's doing? Could be used as a baseline to guess what changes and how fast The Last of Us may make.

[Saka]

From the info I was able to find, the game still has some performance issues and crashes. It seems playable even with a bit older or budget setup though. I spotted a video with someone using RX 480 graphics and that is not very powerful for modern standards. So the 45 fps with optimized settings with that setup are a lot better than having medium at 60 fps with a 2070 Super in The Last of Us.



Here's actual rundown of the settings:

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka From the video it seems that most issues are with advanced graphics like shadows and reflections and such. In all honesty, I do not mind things like that too much, my main issue with the game is that it came to PC in the wrong chronological order. Why play the game about the ending of the saga if you could not play the beginning and middle of it? Makes me think that there really is some truth in that meme you shared.

But back to technical issues, if The Last of Us goes the same route, then it does not look good... We may need to accept that it will need more than a year to get in shape. Sad, but I say better wait than play a game that is not ready.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch On the other hand, in a year or so it might be available with a significant discount on one of the big sales.

Eventually some of the performance hurdles would be brute-forced through by the development of hardware. VRAM amounts are slowly going up in the recent releases, at least on AMD's side. I think, NVIDIA might also increase the VRAM due to the recent backlash they got. 32GB of RAM is also becoming more standard rather than 16GB. That would eliminate the stutters where the game is trying to allocate memory, but all is taken and the system has to purge some, which then in turn causes game to need to re-render things.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka That is true, and I can sympathize with that. Even now I am working my way up through the backlog of games even from the previous decade that I want to play. So it is not a problem to wait for the game to sort itself out and for you to upgrade your hardware to boot. But still, that being said, it is not good for the developers to sort of force games into this position. Laws of the market, I guess...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch People really should stop preordering games. Especially preordering in long advance, before any data is out there. That encourages the companies to keep shipping unfinished products.
@Aaricia asked me about recent reviews on Steam and they are actually pretty positive. 72% of reviews from the last month are positive. I found a really helpful one that had the history of patches included. I pasted it below, original spelling as it's readable enough.

Alright, these are gonna be some harsh words that I´m about to say but I´ll say them anyway.
TLOU is an incredible game and I dont think that its necessary to explain why.
At this point everyone and their mothers have heard about the game so let´s skip that part.
I myself experienced TLOU shortly after release on the PS3 and have never heard about the game in any way possible.
When i got to play it, I was hooked on it so bad that i bought the game 3 more times.
Yes i bought the PS4 Remastered twice (Cause i lost the first copy) and after almost 10 years of waiting I bought it for the PC for the Full Price.... AGAIN, but now I´m finally able to play it... or am I?

Well release wasnt that pleasant but heres a short Rundown on how its state for me was on release, and how it is now.

For my Specs I´m running a Ryzen 5 2600 with 16 Gb of Ram, for the Gpu I´m having a RX5700XT (and yes its being bottlenecked by the Cpu) and im playing on a Full HD Monitor with only 60 hz cause my 144hz Monitor broke recently.
I also have FSR 2.0 activated on the "Quality" Setting.

Okay lets get started:
Release: The game was literally unplayable for me. Besides the extremely Long Shader Cache installation the game itself was horrible and in an absolute unacceptable state.
I had LOADING WINDOWS MID GAME. Even the Ps3 didnt have this (and yes I know the game is specifically coded for the ps3 and other Console Plattforms) but why did they decide to let the Worst Porting studio in the History of PC-Porting handle the biggest Trademark of their company. Well i had the game on all settings, Strict and Mixed (sometimes it didnt even care what my settings were and loaded low poly models instead) and it was just unplayable in every way so i decided to wait.

Patch 1.0.1.5: I mean... it fixed some stuff?
I still resorted to the widelyspread Oodle fix wich did increase my performance a bit and made it "playable" but not enjoyable. Still I managed to play for couple of hours wihtout wanting to rethink my choices in life.

Patch 1.0.1.6: Meh nothing changed really.
Small improvements and a tiny bit less stutter but nothing major really.

Patch 1.0.1.7: This Patch focused mainly on crashes but I never had any Issues with them really.

Patch 1.0.2.0: Okay now we´re talking.
There are some major improvements for stability and performance in general.
Also they fixed the high Vram usage which was just a display error.
It wasnt displaying the right amount of vram usage when changing graphic settings.
Also it reduced the overall Cpu usage which is always nice.

Patch 1.0.2.1: Wonderful.
They fixed an Issue where you had massive camera jitter which was just unbearable.
Small Patch but definitely an Improvement.
At this point I´m also halfway through the Game.

Patch 1.0.3.0: What happened???
This patch focused on mostly audio based issues and various issues across the board but it somehow managed to kinda tank the performance a bit. At this point im almost done with the game but I noticed that my ram was filling to the brim and suddenly dumps everything leaving my cpu to be overloade and my storage doing nothing,
This causes my game to be left at about 30-40 fps for couple of minutes until my ram has been build up again.

Patch 1.0.4.0: WOW.
I finished the game before the Patch released but I´m playing my NG+ save on this patch and ist awesome.
Finally something with not only Major improvements, I´d say they´re Gigantic Improvements.
-More Graphic Settings
-Optimized CPU and GPU Usage
-Much better Performance
-More acceptable Loading Times (Still faster then GTA V)
-Better Texture Streaming across the Board
-And a much more fluent Experience
All the annoying issues at the beginning were gone or mostly fixed.
There are still some major issues, such as the definite memory leak that is happening and I´m pretty sure they can get it much more optimized, but overall the game is moving in a playable and enjoyable state...

which is exactly what it should because i think TLOU is an experience everyone should take the chance to have this experience. And without ad oubt, this remke of the game IS the definitive edition.
Still as a long time fan since the beginning, I´m more then dissapointed in what stae the long awaited PC-Port arrived and i hope for Naughty Dog that the can make this Port to state that its meant to be played, because as it is, it is disrespecting towards themselves, their whole Fanbase (which isnt a small one) and the story that is being told inside the Game.
And thats that.

Edit: Patch 1.0.5 has been released a couple of hours ago. Ill try to play it as soon as the 50gb update has finished.
Its focusing on every major issue so im excited to see for myself how it played out.
Also I know there are a lot of grammar issues in my review so far, but i aint gonna fix them, so go ahead, sue me.
Alright the Patch did fix a lot of stuff but theres something weird about it.
At this point im now able to play the game on Medium-High Settings without FSR Upscaling, and im reaching around 50-60 fps much more stable.
It aint perfect, but its more then playable, its almost enjoyable.
They also fixed the overloading ram issue that set my ram back for about 2-4 gb in space which is a lot.
There are more graphic settings, better resource utilization etc. but there is no real performance bump...
Yes the game runs much more stable and the frametimes are much tighter then before, but real preformance improvements in terms of raw fps, there is no significant difference, but I feel like this is the first version that should have gone to retail.