Conclusion

Following last week's release of Resident Evil 4, The Last of Us Part I requires you to slay even more zombies to achieve your goals. While the two games are similar in terms of their backstory, the actual gaming experience is quite different. The Last of Us seems more personal and you feel more for the various characters, there's also more shooting, and ammo is slightly less scarce. While in Resident Evil you're pretty much on your own most of the time, TLOU has several companions that will join you in your adventure, which helps intensify the experience. On consoles, the Last of Us bagged many awards and is one of the best single-player games of all time—the PC version will be a huge success too, once they figure out the technical issues, more on that later. Check out the various gameplay reviews from our colleagues, definitely a title worth considering.

Under the hood, The Last of Us uses Naughty Dog's in-house engine, which also powered the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves port a few months ago. DirectX 12 is the API of choice, which makes sense for a modern title. While there's no DXR ray tracing, the developer makes heavy use of reflections, which are implemented through a mix of screen space reflections and another unnamed tech, I suspect cubemaps or portals for selected geometry. You also get pre-baked global illumination and physically based shading. Lighting and shadows look fantastic, too.

Check out our screenshots, these are excellent graphics, and they are paired with VERY well designed environments. The designers didn't just rely on the rendering tech, but they made smart use of their assets to create a believable, realistic experience. One highlight is without doubt the characters and their facial expressions which are among the best I've ever seen. What's also impressive is the quality of the textures, which are detailed, sharp and crisp, even if you walk right up to them, but this increases VRAM usage of course. Still, his is a good thing—unused VRAM is useless and there's plenty of settings available to adjust the hardware requirements.

In terms of performance the game is very demanding, similar to other titles released this year. For 60+ FPS at 1080p Full HD you'll need a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, or Radeon RX 6700 XT. 1440p at 60 FPS is in reach for Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3090, and the demanding 4K Ultra HD resolution requires the best of the best—only RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX can achieve 60 FPS here.

Not only rendering performance requirements are high, but VRAM is also challenging. Even at 1600x900 we measured allocation of 10.5 GB, which of course doesn't mean that every single frame touches all the memory. Still, cards with 8 GB do encounter a small FPS penalty even at 1080p. At 4K, the VRAM usage is 14 GB, which makes things challenging for RTX 3080 10 GB and RTX 4070 Ti 12 GB—both these cards drop well below their AMD counterparts at 4K. Generally speaking, AMD does quite well in The Last of Us Part 1. Maybe it helped that we used the company's beta driver that has additional optimizations for the title.

If you've been looking at the Steam ratings of The Last of Us, you've been surprised by a "mostly negative" score. The negative reviews are not due to the gameplay, but due to various crashing issues. On first game launch, the title will start precompiling shaders, a lot of them, totaling 12 GB. This takes forever, even on a decent CPU, 10-20 minutes is not unexpected. What makes things worse is that this shader compilation will often crash, especially on GeForce cards, especially when you have less than 32 GB RAM. At least you don't have to start all over again, but launching the game ten or twenty times just to get to the main menu is really unacceptable. I wonder what the QA testers were doing all this time... Once you've made it into the game the game will crash sometimes (4x in my testing). The AMD Radeon driver also crashed several times during testing, and I've seen numerous reports of DLSS causing additional crashes, when enabled. The developers have already pushed out several game updates, and it seems that they are serious about fixing these problems quickly. Let's hope they can resolve them soon, so that people can enjoy this masterpiece of a game.