Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection finally brings the epic Uncharted series to the PC Platform. Sony chose to port the two newest titles, which of course means the development work isn't as big as when completely revamping an older PS3 title, with new textures, models and graphics. If you've never heard of Uncharted before, think of it as "Tomb Raider with dudes", which is a great oversimplification of course, but it'll help with the concept. You're traveling to exotic locations, and gameplay mostly consists of exploration, platforming, combat and puzzles. Tens of millions of console gamers can't be wrong—you're getting two top notch games here. If you're concerned that you might be missing something because you're starting with part four—don't worry, you'll be fine.

In terms of graphics I found quite big differences between the two included titles. Uncharted 4, which is from 2016, definitely looks "dated", whereas Uncharted: The Lost Legacy looks quite "acceptable" for 2022. Check out our screenshots on page two, I split them into two sections, so you can get a better feel for the visual differences. Both games were originally launched on the Sony PlayStation 4, so it's not surprising that they don't look like a freshly developed title.

If you look closely you can make out shortcomings in the rendering tech, especially when it comes to realistic lighting, but I have to admit that the way the game is scripted feels great, and everything is well-optimized to tell the story and give you a great gameplay experience, so you're barely noticing that graphics aren't top-notch. Especially in Uncharted 4 you often come across areas that are severely lacking in polygon counts, or that have environments that are more flat than what you'd expect to see in newer games.

Uncharted uses an in-house engine called "Naughty Dog Engine", which uses DirectX 12 on the PC platform, but has no support for ray tracing. It still supports a ton of rendering features, which are the reason why the game looked so "next-gen" on the PlayStation 4, six years ago—which is a really long time in graphics. There's support for physically-based rendering, which especially helps with creating lifelike characters that have realistic skin-rendering.

In terms of hardware requirements, Uncharted is not very demanding. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a Radeon RX Vega 64, RX 5600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2060 or RTX 3060. For the more complex 1440p resolution, the Radeon RX 6600 and higher are sufficient, or the NVIDIA RTX 2080 and faster. If you want 4K60, then only cards like the RX 6800 XT, RTX 3080 and faster can achieve fluid gameplay. Especially for AMD Radeon these requirements are surprisingly low, it seems the fact that the PlayStation 4 is based on AMD technology really helps the red team. If we take a closer look at individual cards it's surprising to see that the older Polaris and RDNA1 cards do relatively better than their more modern counterparts, the same is happening for NVIDIA GeForce. Guess the game really is optimized for older GPUs, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. VRAM size is a total non-issue, except maybe for 4 GB cards at 1080p, but everything else that can achieve 60 FPS at the target resolution also has enough VRAM; 8 GB or more.

Uncharted comes with support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2.0, we'll have a separate comparison article up, soon. In this review we have comparisons for the various settings profiles "low", "medium", "high" and "ultra"—as you can see the differences are surprisingly small. Not only the visual differences are small, there's also not much of a performance difference. I feel like the developers should have given owners of low-end hardware a much more useful "low" preset, even if that means lower rendering quality—the point of presets is to offer meaningful options.