The Last of Us Part 1 Early PC Performance Review

An incredibly poor port from Sony

The Last of Us Part 1 is now available on PC, and to say that the game’s release has been a disaster has been an understatement. That’s why we aren’t releasing our usual PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide today, and why we do not recommend purchasing this game in its current state.

In this article, we will be looking at The Last of Us Part 1’s PC version and discuss its problems. To start this off, we have to talk about the game’s shader compilation step, which took over an hour to complete on our Ryzen 5 5600X test system. For users of lower-end CPUs, this step can take even longer. 

It is worth noting here that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X is Naughty Dog’s recommended processor for playing The Last of Us Part 1 at 1440p High settings at 60 FPS. This is the level of processor that Naughty Dog expects PC gamers to have, and it takes over an hour to compile the game’s shaders. While you can play the game before this shader compilation step is completed, doing so means that these shaders need to be compiled while the game is running, resulting in performance issues and instability.

One of the top things on Naughty Dog’s radar should be the time it takes for these shaders to compile. Speeding up this process will reduce the number of players that are trying to play the game without compiled shaders and reduce the length of time that gamers face performance issues in game if they don’t wait.

Review Contents

– CPU Performance

– Resolution Scaling 1080p to 8K

– DLSS Testing

– VRAM Usage

– Conclusion

Drivers and System Specifications

For today’s testing, we have used AMD’s Radeon Software 23.3.2 driver and Nvidia’s 531.41 WHQL drivers. These are the newest drivers that were available at the time of our testing.

Before testing, we fully updated our Windows 11 installation and ensured that no unnecessary background applications were running on our test system.

Full System Specifications

CPU Performance