The Last of Us Is Now Available on PC

[Frag_Maniac]

Glad you had a good experience with it - knew you would

As for fsr2 - it's in the display settings under resolution scaling, rather than the graphics settings. Attached a friends settings pic - you just need to choose fsr2 instead of dlss. With fsr2 you could bump textures to high i reckon.

OK, thanks, I'll look for it again. I'm probably going to need it, because I'm starting to see the FPS dip to the low 40s during tough battles, and it's hard as hell to shoot quickly and accurately at that frame rate. It's the part where I've got Sam to look out for, I'm sure you know it well by now.

 

[Dragam1337]

OK, thanks, I'll look for it again. I'm probably going to need it, because I'm starting to see the FPS dip to the low 40s during tough battles, and it's hard as hell to shoot quickly and accurately at that frame rate. It's the part where I've got Sam to look out for, I'm sure you know it well by now.

So did you get to try out fsr2 ?

 

[Frag_Maniac]

So did you get to try out fsr2 ?

Yes, it yields as much as 33% more FPS in that sewer section I mentioned. I put it on Ultra Performance mode there and quite honestly, while the action is going on you don't notice the visual difference that much due to the slightly heavy fog effects. There's a lot of particle effects going on there, which as you say, affects frame rate a lot. I have to say though, even when it was running at 60-70 FPS, my shots still felt a bit slow, but I'm quite sure that comes down to this game's shooting animations being tailored more to survival horror than shooter style.

I ended up setting it to Performance mode after I got out of the sewers, due to FPS still dropping below 50 a lot. It's not ideal, but I hope to upgrade to at least a 4070 Ti soon. I guess what many are saying is true, that it still could use more optimization because the frame rate often wildly fluctuates. In many parts of the game, I can't manage 60 FPS even with Vsync off, so I turned it back on and set the frame limiter to 60. It tempers down the fluctuation a little, but not as much as I'd like it to. Still though, it's a TON more optimized than Uncharted was.

And BTW, I DID end up finding the option to restore default settings, but it didn't really help. So, in summary, I'm liking the gameplay WAY more than the performance of this game, but I do realize it's mostly because I'm on an older GPU of 3 gens ago. I have to say though I feel FSR 2 is a God send for those of us on these older Nvidia cards that do not support the new NV features. I also think HW Unboxed really should have mentioned FSR 2, rather than leave a lot of people feeling there's no way for them to enjoy this masterpiece of a game.

The only negative for me as far as how this game has affected me is it's had me so engrossed I've now spent two nights in a row staying up WAY longer than I normally do, so it's kind of disrupting my sleep and daily routine. At about 65 now though, I'm retired, so it's more a matter of how that afffects my health, than anything work related.

IIRC, shader recompilation may be required if changing hardware, OS, or drivers. Not always though.

Well now you've got me in an old man funk, because after you saying that, I realize I'm not 100% sure an OS or driver update wasn't the cause of it.

I had no issues running it once I lowered my mouse speed.

Are you talking about sensitivity or polling rate? I really need to know this because that might be part of what's affecting my shot speed, which is still a bit slow even with FSR 2. It makes sense though that a team like IG that works closely with ND on games that were originally made for console and now adapted to PC, might not be all that savvy on mouse scheme coding.

My logi G402 settings are 960 on sensitivity, and 1000 polling rate. I tried turning off raw input in the game's mouse settings, because it makes my mouse a bit too squirrely in a lot of games, but that didn't seem to make much difference. I'm still waiting for Digital Foundry to do an Optimized PC Settings guide for this game.

 

[Lost_Troll]

Are you talking about sensitivity or polling rate? I really need to know this because that might be part of what's affecting my shot speed, which is still a bit slow even with FSR 2.

My mouse movement was supper fast, to the point that I could not get an aim on anything.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

My mouse movement was supper fast, to the point that I could not get an aim on anything.

So then you just lowered sensitivity in game, on mouse, or both? It had zero to do with polling rate?

 

[Lost_Troll]

So then you just lowered sensitivity in game, on mouse, or both? It had zero to do with polling rate?

I had to do both to get it work right, and I did not change anything with the polling rate.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

I had to do both to get it work right, and I did not change anything with the polling rate.

OK thanks, that's what I thought you meant, just making sure.

 

[Tomgang]

I finnally got a chance to try it out today with the latest patch.

I can cleanly see why this game is a stuttering and lagging mess for some people. I even my system had two lags while playing.

Test setting 1440P ultra setting.

Cpu: this game is a cpu hog. Deffently scales on 16 threads at least. In the beginning my 5950X was at 60 % to 90 % load on a 32 thread cpu, crazy. while I was in the house controlling the girl at the beginning of the game. Out side of the house and the rest of my playthrow. Cpu wass at 40 to 50 % load. Peaked at 55 % load. So it actually peaked some time on more than 16 threads.

So people with 4 and 6 cores with or without smt/ht will not have a good time on max settings in this game. The same goes for people with 8 core cpu with out smt/ht. This game want 16 threads for sure. So if you have lag, see if your cpu might be pegged at 100 % load the whole time.

Memory: at 1440P ultra setting i got 18 gb+ usage. So 16 gb might not cut it for you above 1080P. Not enough memory can cause game crash.

Gpu: rtx 4090 has plenty of power for this game. At 1440P ultra setting i saw vram usage of around 11 gb. So yes 12 gb is preferred for 1440P and 4k even more vram.

Sharing my experience as I think much of the lag and crashes are caused by to weak cpu and to little memory for used settings. Vram also needs to be sufficient off cause.

 

[Dragam1337]

I finnally got a chance to try it out today with the latest patch.

I can cleanly see why this game is a stuttering and lagging mess for some people. I even my system had two lags while playing.

Test setting 1440P ultra setting.

Cpu: this game is a cpu hog. Deffently scales on 16 threads at least. In the beginning my 5950X was at 60 % to 90 % load on a 32 thread cpu, crazy. while I was in the house controlling the girl at the beginning of the game. Out side of the house and the rest of my playthrow. Cpu wass at 40 to 50 % load. Peaked at 55 % load. So it actually peaked some time on more than 16 threads.

So people with 4 and 6 cores with or without smt/ht will not have a good time on max settings in this game. The same goes for people with 8 core cpu with out smt/ht. This game want 16 threads for sure. So if you have lag, see if your cpu might be pegged at 100 % load the whole time.

Memory: at 1440P ultra setting i got 18 gb+ usage. So 16 gb might not cut it for you above 1080P. Not enough memory can cause game crash.

Gpu: rtx 4090 has plenty of power for this game. At 1440P ultra setting i saw vram usage of around 11 gb. So yes 12 gb is preferred for 1440P and 4k even more vram.

Sharing my experience as I think much of the lag and crashes are caused by to weak cpu and to little memory for used settings. Vram also needs to be sufficient off cause.

While cpu usage in this game is high, that in itself will not cause stuttering. What will cause stuttering is a full buffer... be it ram, or much more likely, vram.

 

[wolf]

Looks like the port has so many issues steam are offering refunds regardless of play time.. Yikes.

 

[Dragam1337]

Looks like the port has so many issues steam are offering refunds regardless of play time.. Yikes.

It doesn't though - only issue is that it is letting mouth breathers choose for themselfs what settings they are going to use, even when their hardware aint up for the task. Higher texture levels should be greyed out on low vram gpus. And shader compiling should be unskipable.

 

[GamerGuy]

It doesn't though - only issue is that it is letting mouth breathers choose for themselfs what settings they are going to use, even when their hardware aint up for the task. Higher texture levels should be greyed out on low vram gpus. And shader compiling should be unskipable.

Yep, I agree, many don't understand VRAM usage and thus, based on their past experience, simply set everything to 'Ultra' and expect the game to run smoothly. Just like DSR, the traversal and odd hitching issue have been blown up by mouth breathers. I've played the game on both my rigs, and with my weaker rig (R9 3900X + 32GB RAM + RX 6900 XT) I can have a pretty good experience with it on my 4K TV with FSR2 at 'Quality'. Framerate dips below 60fps, but is still quite playable despite the ever present hitching. It's not a "stuttering mess" as some have chosen to describe it, unless, like for TLOU players, they have set ingame graphics settings too high for their hardware to handle.

 

[izy]

It works pretty well for me with DLSS tweaked to 85% scale , VRAM showing in game just a bit over 8g and RAM at 15g, i had the game first on an normal HDD and i had shutters , moved it to ssd and everything is smooth (2060 super) even when im streaming on twitch (1080p @ 60 fps) using the gpu encoder.
(some settings at ultra , some high , some medium)

Edit: I see there is a CPU FPS option in the game , on my 5700x PBO it goes from 65-75fps lowest (rare) up to 140fps i think , 95% of the time its over 100fps

 

[Night]

Looks like the port has so many issues steam are offering refunds regardless of play time.. Yikes.

I don't get how releasing a game in beta state is normal now and goes unpunished. People buying these beta state games are used as free quality control workforce. You're paying them 60€ and reporting what's broken in their code for free. I think Steam should have some QC testers before the game can be made available in the store (at least for expensive 'AAA' titles), but of course $$$ income is a top priority after all.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Looks like the port has so many issues steam are offering refunds regardless of play time.. Yikes.

I think that is the right move... Even though my experience has been pretty great you shouldn't need a 4090 with 32GB of ram to play a game and if you do it should clearly be stated.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Looks like the port has so many issues steam are offering refunds regardless of play time.. Yikes.

I'm pretty sure if Valve has done that, it's more likely to appease the many idiots whom don't wait for shaders to compile or don't know how to adjust settings, in order to keep them from continuing spewing nonsense and misleading others. I mean Steam isn't exactly a peaceful place to get reviews, it's full of abrasive, immature types.

...you shouldn't need a 4090 with 32GB of ram to play a game and if you do it should clearly be stated.

That's only if you insist on max settings at 4K with at or near 60 FPS throughout the game. And it WAS stated in one of the most detailed system requirement charts I've ever seen, which was updated for more accuracy too. Anyone that doesn't read sys reqs before buying a game has no right to say they didn't know.

I was skeptical too, but since buying and playing it, I have found despite FPS not being quite what I'd like and fluctuating quite a bit, it still runs smoother than the Uncharted port did. FSR 2 makes a world of difference, and I suspect many whom are endlessly bashing this port may have not even tried using it, or at least it's Performance mode.

 

[cvaldes]

It's not just the Great Unwashed (a.k.a. "mouth breathers") who are having performance issues with the game. Even professional PC game reviewers have experienced many of these problems. The latter are people who generally known how to optimize game settings for their hardware (which often include a wide range of components, particularly GPUs).

The fact that the publisher is releasing a bunch of patches in quick succession (including two planned for this week) provides ample evidence how much the devs put into PC software QA: exactly zero hours.

They are doing workarounds for their piss poor code that they should have done before release. That they are able to do it now so quickly basically means they didn't bother to spend any time whatsoever testing the game (including repeated crashes during shader compilation). That's right, their software QA team didn't even play the game on a new system.

The Steam store refunds show how the storefront is siding, with the consumer.

The dev would have done nothing it the reviews weren't so horrendous.

And most tellingly, the publisher has admitted in writing that the game's release condition was not satisfactory. No need for apologist forum participants to try to concoct B.S. explanations justifying the game's embarrassing debut.

This is like going to a restaurant, ordering an omelet, and receiving a bowl full of raw rotten eggs. "Oh, we forgot to cook the eggs. Sorry about that. We'll bring out another. And it's still full price."

Or checking into a hotel and finding the room with an unmade bed and a dirty bathroom.

This is how some publishers think AAA games should be released on PC in 2023. Very respectful toward their PC gaming clientele, eh?

Appalling.

The video game industry really needs to grow up someday. And gamers need to stop enabling this sort of bad behavior by stop pre-ordering games and paying full retail. Just wait six months after release for the patches and a price discount.

The game in its current state is not worth $60.

 

[Dragam1337]

It's not just the Great Unwashed (a.k.a. "mouth breathers") who are having performance issues with the game. Even professional PC game reviewers have experienced many of these problems. The latter are people who generally known how to optimize game settings for their hardware (which often include a wide range of components, particularly GPUs).

The fact that the publisher is releasing a bunch of patches in quick succession (including two planned for this week) provides ample evidence how much the devs put into PC software QA: exactly zero hours.

They are doing workarounds for their piss poor code that they should have done before release. That they are able to do it now so quickly basically means they didn't bother to spend any time whatsoever testing the game (including repeated crashes during shader compilation). That's right, their software QA team didn't even play the game on a new system.

The Steam store refunds show how the storefront is siding, with the consumer.

The dev would have done nothing it the reviews weren't so horrendous.

And most tellingly, the publisher has admitted in writing that the game's release condition was not satisfactory. No need for apologist forum participants to try to concoct B.S. explanations justifying the game's embarrassing debut.

This is like going to a restaurant, ordering an omelet, and receiving a bowl full of raw rotten eggs. "Oh, we forgot to cook the eggs. Sorry about that. We'll bring out another. And it's still full price."

Or checking into a hotel and finding the room with an unmade bed and a dirty bathroom.

This is how some publishers think AAA games should be released on PC in 2023. Very respectful toward their PC gaming clientele, eh?

Appalling.

The video game industry really needs to grow up someday. And gamers need to stop enabling this sort of bad behavior by stop pre-ordering games and paying full retail. Just wait six months after release for the patches and a price discount.

The game in its current state is not worth $60.

Aside of alot of hot air, what was your point ? What exactly about this game doesn't work ?

 

[xu^]

Got most of the Sony PC ports so far, but think im going to pass on this one for a while, see if it gets brought up to a decent standard.

 

[wolf]

It doesn't though - only issue is that it is letting mouth breathers choose for themselfs what settings they are going to use, even when their hardware aint up for the task. Higher texture levels should be greyed out on low vram gpus. And shader compiling should be unskipable.

lol, the game is the problem my dude, not people choosing the settings, a game should never crash because of the settings you chose. It absolutely needs to warn/grey out options you can't or shouldn't select, and yes compilation should be unskipable.

 

[sepheronx]

Aside of alot of hot air, what was your point ? What exactly about this game doesn't work ?

Gee, I don't know, maybe everything to the point steam is offering a return regardless how long you played?

I mean, everyone, including reviewers are wrong but not you. Cause you are so damn smart.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Aside of alot of hot air, what was your point ? What exactly about this game doesn't work ?

Yeah, like I said, I couldn't help but be skeptical before buying it with all the hate aimed at it, but I'm pretty sure I'm most of the way through the game now and I've STILL only had that one crash that very well may have been caused by me by a long minimized pause while I was doing something else, and only two very minor bugs have occurred. One was a part where you need to plug a power cord into a generator. I couldn't because the interactive prompt to grab the cord would disappear as I approached it. I got past it via their built in option in Accessibility to Solve Puzzle if you're stuck on one. The other was merely a case where Ellie for some reason did not follow me into a new area after I hopped over a gate, which I used a car next to it to get high enough. Simply loading the checkpoint that was generated right after going over the gate made her appear beside me.

I don't think it's mere good luck that I'm experiencing no stutters, multiple crashes, or numerous bugs that many claim happen. I thinks it's partly that I did no more than adjust settings while waiting for shaders to compile, plus updated to the driver made for the game, and have been sensible with settings. Some here have implied you need an exact VRAM number to know if you're going over your GPU's mem limit, but they give you plenty adequate warning when trying to use settings that will cause performance problems.

So yeah, there's plenty reason to believe the exaggerations are coming from the neg feedback, not the positive. I will add that there are TONS of games releasing with need for patching these days, especially since COVID, but I consider what they are doing to be more or less added polish than major damage control. Exaggerations are the status quo on Steam.

 

[Fasola]

Guess I'll wait.

Link to an article about the video.

 

[AusWolf]

The only game that made me consider buying a PS4. Now I'm glad I didn't.

With that said, I won't buy it for a while because 60 quid for a PC port of a several years old game is a ripoff.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Guess I'll wait.

Link to an article about the video.

I'll have to go through and look again, but I don't recall seeing any textures as blurry as Alex is showing at Med textures. My main concern is the CPU being so heavily loaded, which makes me think bumping up to a 4070 Ti on my 8700K isn't going to necessarily solve the entire problem FPS wise. I'm sure it would texture wise though because 12GB VRAM should allow High textures, possibly even at 1440p. Then again, I have just 16GB RAM and wasn't planning on going 32GB until I upgrade to something like a 13700K, meaning I might still be stuck at 1080p. So I may end up just upgrading the core platform like I originally planned, and eventually go with something like a 4090 or 5080.

I've now finished the game though and I only had that one crash, which again, very well may have been caused by my minimizing the game at length while doing something else, and just the two minor bugs. I never had a problem with stutter or hitching though, and actually finished out the game with FSR 2 on Quality mode with mostly near 60 FPS.

I have to say though, I was a bit disappointed by the ending of the game. The tunnel was FAR too easy to sneak through, and the hospital seemed cool at first, but then just felt too repetitive, with a WAY too easy sneak to get to Ellie.

This might be the very first Digital Foundry review where I don't entirely agree with Alex's assessment, whom I've always admired for his attention to detail. I won't know until I look at the game closer though. Hopefully the devs are paying attention to this video and will be able to determine how they can make some further improvements.