The Last of Us Part 1 Patch 1.0.4 Tested – Improved Performance and new PC settings

The Last of Us Part 1 has now received its first major optimisation patch, but does it fix the game?

Patch 1.0.4.0 is The Last of Us Part 1’s first major optimisation patches, offering gamers “framerate optimisations” that impact CPU and GPU performance, and changes to the game’s texture settings that allow for higher levels of graphical fidelity at low/medium settings without an increase in VRAM (GPU memory) requirements. With this update, The Last of Us Part 1 should run better than ever on PC, though Naughty Dog has confirmed that more updates are planned.

One of the major changes that are delivered by update 1.0.4.0 is a new setting called “Ambient Character Density”, which reduces the number of NPCs (non-playable characters) in areas of the game that do not include combat. This includes the city sections of the game where Joel is travelling though a safe zone, and the start of the game where Joel and his Daughter Sarah are trying to evacuate during the early days of the infection. 

All updates for The Last of Us Part 1 have addressed many of the game’s bugs and instability issues, which when combined with the game’s performance related changes now make The Last of Us Part 1 a low more enjoyable on PC. Had the game released on PC in its current state, it would not have received as negative of a reception, though there is still work to be done before we would call this a good PC port.

In this patch testing update, we will be looking at patch 1.0.4.0 and compare the performance levels of The Last of Us Part 1’s day-1 PC version and its current PC version. Have things dramatically improved? Let’s get started.

Review Contents

– Test Scene Benchmarks – Strange Results

– CPU Optimisation – New CPU-related settings

– VRAM Usage (It’s lower)

– Conclusion

Drivers and System Specifications

For today’s testing, we have used Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Gaming graphics card and Nvidia’s 531.61 WHQL drivers. These are the newest WHQL 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.

(Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Gaming Graphics Card)

Full System Specifications

Patch 1.0.4 VS Day-1 Performance – How much have things changed?