Digital Foundry has published an in-depth technical review for The Last of Us Part II Remastered on PC, which was released earlier today. While it has been regarded as an improvement over the woeful release of The Last of Us Part I on PC, it’s still not as good as it could be.
In some aspects, The Last of Us Part II on PC performs worse – or not as well as you’d expect comparatively – than the base PlayStation 4, which was released in 2013. For instance, Digital Foundry found that a GPU with more than three times the compute power of the base PS4 wasn’t able to consistently double the performance of The Last of Us Part II on PlayStation 4.
In The Weeds
Digital Foundry’s comprehensive technical review of The Last of Us Part II Remastered on PC is pretty insane. It’s fifteen minutes long, and it takes the time to dive into absolutely every aspect of the game, from frame rates and load speeds, and from texture clarity to settings optimisation.
The team mentioned that the game’s usage of GPU resources is ‘a bit inordinate’, comparing the figures between a base PS4 and an RTX 3060 GPU. The PC GPU should be able to walk rings around the PlayStation 4’s tech, but that’s not what’s happening with this game, as DF explains:
We should be looking at a GPU that is around 3.5 times more performant in compute, even at a non-boosted clock. Yet the RTX 3060 cannot fully double the PS4’s performance in this game at the closest equivalent settings.
This is a very large outlier in our history of examining PC ports.
Whether or not that’s justified is up to the jury, but that means you as a user will have to adjust your expectations accordingly. You really don’t want to drop below those PS4 settings, as I see it, as you’re getting a visual experience worse than a 12-year-old console at that point.
DF also revealed that stuttering and framerate drops were fairly common, and at one point, they reveal that the game would lock up without any prior warning before leaping back into life a few seconds later. They also detected issues with shadows popping in at odd times – even on maxed-out settings.
These issues weren’t present on the PS4 Pro backwards-compatible version of the game on PS5.
Have you played The Last of Us Part II Remastered on PC yet? Let me know if you’re having issues in the comments or on the Insider Gaming forum.
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