Naughty Dog is essentially bringing in-house the polishing of the PC port of the PlayStation 5 remake of its 2013 game released last year. Or you could mod the game. In fact, it is recommended!
A blog post on Naughty Dog’s site celebrates the PC port of The Last of Us Part I, and here Christian Gyrling, the studio’s VP of development, begins with “As we began in-house development,” which started with the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. The same studio responsible for its PC port botched Joel and Ellie’s PC debut (Iron Galaxy).
The pirated version currently gives better performance than the official one. The buggy Oodle library can been replaced with an old one, which eliminates crashes and stutters or speeds up compiling shaders. The developers used the 2.9.6 Oodle library, which is officially known to have memory leakage issues. Since you hear this issue around the game, it certainly says a lot. By going back to version 2.9.5, this bug will disappear, improving performance. So if you want better performance, copy oo2core_9_win64.dll into the game directory where the executables are. Because of this, the shaders need to be rebuilt. If the game is buggy, file integrity is recommended. It is recommended to empty the psolibs directory by deleting the shaders. Look for Oodle here on NexusMods.
The first patch has already been released. 1.0.1.5 is only 36 MB, but it’s an excellent place to start. The patch notes say, “Fixed several performance & hitch related issues impacting some users. Note: Additional improvements and investigations based on user feedback are underway. Added extra crash diagnostic information to investigate shader building-related crashes and other commonly reported stability issues.” Despite it, feedback hasn’t improved much: on Steam, there’s talk of shaders loading a little faster, but crashing and other issues are still present
On Naughty Dog’s site, the list of known bugs suggests the most critical issues: “Loading shaders takes longer than expected. Performance and stability are degraded while shaders are loading in the background. Older graphics drivers lead to instability and/or graphical problems. The game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements. A potential memory leak.”
ElAnalistaDeBits compared the PlayStation 5 version to the PC port, and the Steam Deck performance was also mentioned in the video. On PC, the visuals are slightly better (higher texture and shadow resolution, more geometry, better draw distance, improved water physics and interaction). Still, frame pacing, missing animations, and clipping of textures detract from the overall picture. The loading time being five times faster on PlayStation 5 was somewhat expected. On PlayStation 5, 4K/30 FPS is present for resolution and 1440/60 FPS in quality mode, respectively; on PC, it ran at 4K with maximum settings on an RTX 4080, 4070 Ti, 3080, and 3050. Steam Deck had 800p with low settings, FSR Quality, with shoddy performance.
So far, it’s awful.
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