The Last of Us Is Now Available on PC

[dirtyferret]

The only pathetic thing here is the manner in which you replied to me.

after reading your posts, I do not believe the word pathetic means what you think it means

 

[sepheronx]

It's not about who is and isn't allowed to complain. It's more about the fact that there's no need to state the obvious. When you have a 4090, of course your games run well, the same way when you have a Ferrari, of course it's fast. When your games don't run well on your 4090, that's when you should complain.

At least someone gets it.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

OK, after playing up to the start of the Fall segment where Joel and Ellie are approaching Tommy's Dam on a new Hard mode run, I have checked visuals up close on many wall surfaces, but I also found I was not all the way updated to the latest patch version. I can now run it on FSR 2 at Quality mode and get at or near 60 FPS most of the time. It has even sped up Joel's run and reaction time, and the shaders compile in about 15 min now, quite an improvement (I purposely deleted the cache folder just to check shader compilation again on the latest patch)..

I focused a lot on inspecting brick walls, since that was one of Digital Foundry's main nit picks. I never saw any brick walls as blurry as they show in their video, but it's painted flat wall surface's often DO look a bit blurry. So I have to wonder if Digital Foundry made that video on a prior patch version. They pretty much warn viewers at the start of the vid that they've heard talk of new updates coming on a regular basis.

To be clear, I don't like the VRAM or RAM requirements for 1440p or higher AT ALL, or the game's tendency to use so much CPU, but when it comes to playing on older spec at 1080p, the game can definitely handle it. In fact I went back to bumping up AF to 16x, and am now running High Characters Texture Quality, which still fits within my 8GB VRAM and shows no signs of worse performance.

However, the game now has this weird tendency to post a message on subsequent launches that last time it shut down abnormally, asking me if I want to launch it in safe mode and enable diagnostics, even though it shut down fine. I just say no to both and it launches, now quicker than before (no wait for spinning coin to appear). It does as well on rare occasion show a larger error reporting message, though not when shutting down. This could be the reason for the message that it shut down abnormally, but I just click no, it disappears, and it's as if nothing had happened.

So it seems clear the latest patches HAVE caused some weird false error messages or something, but actual in-game performance has improved quite a bit from what I've seen. I say false error messages because so far the game HAS NOT actually crashed to desktop once on this new run up to the start of the Tommy's Dam segment. I get the feeling the false messages are a problem with the diagnostic system they're using, but why it would generate false error messages when I have yet to actually enable the diagnostics when asked seems strange.

 

[Dragam1337]

OK, after playing up to the start of the Fall segment where Joel and Ellie are approaching Tommy's Dam on a new Hard mode run, I have checked visuals up close on many wall surfaces, but I also found I was not all the way updated to the latest patch version. I can now run it on FSR 2 at Quality mode and get at or near 60 FPS most of the time. It has even sped up Joel's run and reaction time, and the shaders compile in about 15 min now, quite an improvement.

I focused a lot on inspecting brick walls, since that was one of Digital Foundry's main nit picks. I never saw any brick walls as blurry as they show in their video, but it's painted flat wall surface's often DO look a bit blurry. So I have to wonder if Digital Foundry made that video on a prior patch version. They pretty much warn viewers at the start of the vid that they've heard talk of new updates coming on a regular basis.

To be clear, I don't like the VRAM or RAM requirements for 1440p or higher AT ALL, or the game's tendency to use so much CPU, but when it comes to playing on older spec at 1080p, the game can definitely handle it. In fact I went back to bumping up AF to 16x, and am now running High Characters Texture Quality, which still fits within my 8GB VRAM and shows no signs of worse performance.

Tbh i think you can just use all textures on high quality, when you also use FSR, as FSR lowers the vram consumption a bit

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Tbh i think you can just use all textures on high quality, when you also use FSR, as FSR lowers the vram consumption a bit

Well, the game's VRAM usage graph bumps up to 8200, 200 Mb over my limit, when I enable just High Environment Textures, so I've been reluctant to try it. I also tend to think it would force me to use Ultra Performance FSR mode, which would somewhat negate the purpose of High Textures. I'll try it anyway and report back, as you have made me curious enough to try.

I'm still occasionally getting dips to 43-45 FPS, but usually in non consequential situations. So not ALL is smooth sailing. Another thing that's really weird compared to what pro reviewers are saying is you know that heavily forested segment DF and others are using as an example of frame rate drops, the part where Ellie remarks how beautiful a setting it is, and there's a big white bird, swan or something straight ahead when the scene loads? I clocked that whole area at a solid 60 FPS last night on the latest patch with FSR 2 Quality, 16x AF, and High Character Textures, so you can see why I'm skeptical about some of what DF are saying.

 

[Dragam1337]

Well, the game's VRAM usage graph bumps up to 8200, 200 Mb over my limit, when I enable just High Environment Textures, so I've been reluctant to try it. I also tend to think it would force me to use Ultra Performance FSR mode, which would somewhat negate the purpose of High Textures. I'll try it anyway and report back, as you have made me curious enough to try.

I'm still occasionally getting dips to 43-45 FPS, but usually in non consequential situations. So not ALL is smooth sailing.

My friend is using all high textures with a 8gb vram gpu at 1080p and dlss quality, which is essentially the same as fsr2 quality mode. No stutters. I'd just try it out if i were you - you can just swap it back

 

[Frag_Maniac]

My friend is using all high textures with a 8gb vram gpu at 1080p and dlss quality, which is essentially the same as fsr2 quality mode. No stutters. I'd just try it out if i were you - you can just swap it back

Does it drop FPS though, I tend to find if FPS dips significantly below 50, you can get micro stutter in many parts of the game. MS is something certain players are more susceptible to than others, so I can't have that, especially with my 65 yr, "old man" eyes.

 

[Dragam1337]

Does it drop FPS though, I tend to find if FPS dips significantly below 50, you can get micro stutter in many parts of the game. MS is something certain players are more susceptible to than others, so I can't have that, especially with my 65 yr, "old man" eyes.

No, it wouldn't lower fps. It could potentially cause stuttering, but i don't suspect that it will, as long as you keep fsr enabled in quality mode Thing is that they usually overestimate how much vram your desktop uses, assuming you're not running a ton of stuff in the background. And as such, you will probably have 500 to 1000 mb more vram available than it shows in the settings.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

No, it wouldn't lower fps. It could potentially cause stuttering, but i don't suspect that it will, as long as you keep fsr enabled in quality mode Thing is that they usually overestimate how much vram your desktop uses, assuming you're not running a ton of stuff in the background. And as such, you will probably have 500 to 1000 mb more vram available than it shows in the settings.

Well I've been testing it on all High Textures throughout the Dam section and at the University and it stays at good FPS for the most part but every now and then a certain scene will drop FPS to as low as 38 and cause a bit of hitching. It only lasts like a second or so, then it pops right back up. The Turbine that they got started at the Dam was one of those scenes, and encountering the monkeys for the first time outdoors was another. Those are really the only spots I recall it happening. Horseback riding through heavily forested areas caused no problems though, as well as Ellie's hunting scene, which looked beautiful.

I'm really shocked I'm getting this kind of performance on my spec, pretty much at or near 60 FPS most of the time even with everything on High at 1080p with FSR Quality. One of the weird things when setting Textures to High (with Characters Textures already at High), was the first one on the list, Dynamic Objects I think, caused the VRAM graph to bump up above 8000 MB, but then once I got all of them set to high, it dropped down to like 7700 MB. I've got a few scenes I captured to verify all this with MSI Afterburner showing FPS and CPU and GPU usage and temps for any whom are hesitant to buy this game. It just might make you think twice when reading many of the negative reviews on performance.

 

[wolf]

At least someone gets it.

And from my perspective, another person doesn't. I don't think I can explain the value any more simply, and my point being misrepresented doesn't help either (as 4090 = fast rather than 4090 performance relative to the unique workload in question, which has many issues and is a hot topic), but hey your perception is your reality and who am I to to say you're and more wrong or right than I am. If you both get no value from it, I cannot provide that value for you. It has provided value to me.

 

[sepheronx]

And from my perspective, another person doesn't. I don't think I can explain the value any more simply, and my point being misrepresented doesn't help either (as 4090 = fast rather than 4090 performance relative to the unique workload in question, which has many issues and is a hot topic), but hey your perception is your reality and who am I to to say you're and more wrong or right than I am. If you both get no value from it, I cannot provide that value for you. It has provided value to me.

No, you are just trying to play devils advocate for the sake of it.

Since you didn't understand what I said or Aus said isn't my concern and you can think however way you want. You just ended up wasting time and effort though in that matter.

 

[wolf]

No, you are just trying to play devils advocate for the sake of it.

No I'm not, but thanks for the guess.

Since you didn't understand what I said or Aus said

It's pretty simple, I understood it just fine (well what Aus said, you just agreed), and I reject his notion as I have found value in it. Again, if you both found no value I cannot help that and it's perfectly valid to personally find it not useful, but you cannot deny others that they might, because some have.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

And here's that video I was referring to. Refer to my prior post above if you've not read it.

I should first say this game uses a lot of RAM and CPU. I've always used a tool to disable all telemetry in W10, which frees up at least 1GB RAM, and I highly recommend that for this game. I use O&O ShutUp10, and it can be done with one click. If you prefer to have some apps accessible vs all of them off, it's just as easily reversed as well. I'm sure the same can be done in W11 if you happen to be using it instead.

The frame drop I referred to happens at 8:33. There is also a hitch at 14:13, but that one is a ShadowPlay capture glitch, it didn't occur in game. You can either choose to believe me or not on that one, but you can clearly see the FPS does not drop.