The Last of Us Part 1 Patch 1.0.2.0 Tested – Does the game run better now?

The Last of Us Part 1’s first major patch has arrived

The Last of Us Part 1’s PC version launched in a poor state, but after the release of Patch 1.0.2.0, we though that now was a good time to revisit the game and see how much the game’s performance has improved. 

Like last time, we will be testing The Last of Us Part 1 with our standard test rig and with an RTX 4090 graphics card. Sadly, The Last of Us Part 1’s PC patches do not appear to have shortened the time that this game’s Shader Completion step takes, which means that users of CPUs like our Ryzen 5 5600X can wait for up to an hour for this game’s shaders to compile. Hopefully a future patch will shorten this step’s computational time.

With patch 1.0.1.5, Naughty Dog promised lower VRAM use by lowering the size of The Last of Us Part 1’s shader cache, which means that we expect VRAM usage to drop. Additionally, Patch 1.0.2.0 promises “updated texture streaming to reduce CPU usage”. This means that we can expect some improvements to The Last of Us Part 1’s CPU performance, but probably not a huge performance uplift.

In this article we will be looking at the PC performance of The Last of Us Part 1 again and seeing how much Iron Galaxy and Naughty Dog’s updates have improved the game on PC, and see if gamers should wait for additional updates before playing this game.

Review Contents

– CPU Performance (Slightly improved)

– Resolution Scaling 1080p to 4K

– VRAM Usage (It’s much lower now)

– Conclusion

Drivers and System Specifications

For today’s testing, we have used Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Gaming graphics card and Nvidia’s 531.41 WHQL drivers. These are the newest WHQL drivers that were available at the time of our testing. We did not update to Nvidia’s hotfix driver as it does not fix anything for the RTX 4090 and we didn’t want to spend an hour recompiling this game’s shaders.

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

(Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Gaming Graphics Card)

Full System Specifications

CPU Performance – Gains, but not game-changing gains