The Last of Us Part 1 is not immune to the plague of shadows (opens in a new tab) which causes many PC games to stutter and crash.
Sony’s latest PC port messes with all kinds of hardware, regardless of the game’s modest system requirements. Players are reporting stuttering, frame rate inconsistencies and frequent crashes.
The root of the problems seems to stem from the game’s shader compilation, which has become a common problem in PC games over the past few years. Your graphics card needs to do some pre-rendering before the world can be rendered properly, and this needs to be done in preparation for every scene in the game at least once. In some cases, developers can precompile shaders so that you don’t have to do it when you start the game, but this is not a common practice.
The Last of Us Part 1 lets you jump right into the game and set the background sounds, but it warns you about performance issues. I chose to play the game right away and the shading progress only reached 40% in the 10 minutes I played before it crashed. When I restarted it, the progress jumped to 80%. It’s worth noting that my computer has an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, Intel Core i9 12900K and 32GB of RAM – more than enough to run such a game at modest settings with DLSS enabled.
An early scene during the game’s intro sequence asked me to wait, presumably to load the shaders for the next sequence. Otherwise, it was going well until Joel and Tess took their first steps into the overgrown city. Players with all kinds of hardware setups – from Nvidia 4090s to 2070s – on the game subreddit (opens in a new tab) and Steam Forums (opens in a new tab) The stuttering and crashing have been reported to persist until the shaders finish compiling.
On Steam, it’s game over 1,400 opinions (opens in a new tab) which are “mostly negative”. Many of them criticize the amount of time it takes to compile the shaders, the number of crashes and how much system resources it eats even when it’s done. Steam user Benja (opens in a new tab)The negative review for this simply reads: “The Crash of Us™ Part I.”
The PC version was jointly developed by Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy, the same studio that recently brought the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves collection (opens in a new tab) PC. It’s unclear how much work Naughty Dog did on the PC version itself, but it says, “Sharing our stories and experiences on both PS5 and PC is something Naughty Dog has embraced and will continue to support moving forward.” Blog post (opens in a new tab) today, suggesting it will be part of future PC ports.
Uncharted, Iron Galaxy’s latest PC port, has a limited set of graphics options, but, aside from a bit of stuttering at launch, it seems to run well for most people. Sony’s latest PC release, Returnal (opens in a new tab)Developed by Climax Studios, and 2021’s God of War (opens in a new tab) The PC version was made by Jetpack Interactive.
Sony has not commented on the port’s performance or whether it plans to release a patch soon.
The huge success of the adaptation The Last of Us (opens in a new tab) HBO has almost certainly convinced a lot of people to finally give the game a try, but until it runs properly, you might be better off starting a rewatch instead.