The hype for The Last of Us never seems to stop. Throughout the decade and years, the message was that this fungal post-apocalyptic road trip was the game to end all games. The triumph of interactive entertainment as a narrative medium. As the man behind the HBO adaptation proudly says, “the greatest story ever told in a video game”.
This is of course nonsense. Don’t get me wrong – TLOU is good. Great, even. But being told repeatedly that the Tramadol Uncharted game with ladders represents an entire medium at its peak, it feels like it went from marketing to straight-up gaslighting. Still, you’d expect the entity ultimately in charge of gaslighting (Sony) to invest in making sure the greatest game of all time doesn’t become a dog’s breakfast when the PC port hits store shelves.
Unfortunately, it’s kind of like a dog’s breakfast. But first, the good things: When it runs, there are no crashes, it looks lovely, and there’s a set of tweakable graphics options that go above and beyond the visuals on the PS5, which is already extravagant. In terms of image fidelity, the PC version is king, with denser foliage, higher resolution shadows, reflections and particles all possible, all with decent ultrawide support if you have the necessary monitor run.
However, in terms of performance, things are pretty bad. The VRAM situation is puzzling: no matter how you tweak the settings, the game will pretty much use up the 12GB GPU. For the avoidance of doubt, the vast majority of users do not have 12gb of VRAM, and very few users have more than 12GB of VRAM. Navigating the constraints of available resources like this is likely a factor in the game’s horrific stability: it crashes periodically. As far as I’m concerned, it makes sense for the game to fail every time a key story moment is about to happen: a flood of new assets pushing the system to its limits in preparation for a new level or cutscene.
For a game full of pivotal story moments (it’s, after all, “the greatest story ever told in a video game”), this leads to frequent CTDs, resulting in a rather miserable and anxious experience for exactly the wrong reasons.
In addition to crashing, stuttering is also bad. The game suffers from micro-stutters on many systems — that is, barely perceptible inconsistencies in frame timing where you almost feel like there’s more to it than you see. Moving the camera around feels choppy and grainy. It’s like the game is hitting your retina with a ball hammer instead of flowing smoothly into it. Depending on your personality, it can be irritating at best. In worst cases, it can cause headaches.
In general, the game coughs and crackles whenever a new level is loaded, despite the shader compile cycle going on for a very long time (over an hour for some users, about 45 minutes on my system) . And, as Sherif points out in the video, this is a game that cleverly hides the transitions from one level to the next, so you never really know when this clutter is going to happen.
To be fair, TLOU Part 1 was arguably a game that was difficult to port from professional, standardized hardware to essentially non-professional and non-standard platforms. The original PS5 release was designed to take advantage of the PS5’s ultra-fast storage: a proprietary system with hardware-based compression/decompression built around a blazingly fast 7,000 MB/s SSD. For raw data, most PCs cannot match this retrieval speed. But this disadvantage is offset by the larger pool of RAM and VRAM available to the PC. However, this mess happens on my system, which has 64gb of system RAM (four times that of the PS5) and 12gb of VRAM (which, as discussed, is almost taken for granted by gaming).
I’m not a game developer, so my understanding of video game resource management is rudimentary at best. I’m not claiming to be an expert here. But the results are what count, and here they are incredibly unsatisfying. A PC version that maximizes a high-end PC like this while running with all the robustness of a crumbling pile of crockery is frankly not fit for purpose. For the vast majority of users, this build is a complete waste of time in a market where midrange system specs are far less advanced than the 3080ti (which hasn’t been advanced for nearly two years now). But, nonetheless, the recommended system specs give the impression that you can run it just fine on 2018 hardware.
I hope that upcoming updates (the first of which is scheduled for release tomorrow at the time of this writing) will address this situation for PC consumers and bring the specs that are actually required in line with the specs suggested by the storefront. Because right now, it’s cruel and downright misleading to sell this game as a work in a recommended way, at least on cutting-edge hardware that most of the people who buy it simply don’t have.
“The greatest story ever told in a video game” certainly deserves better than this.
