The last of us the computer is running in a bad state. While I haven’t had as many problems as some players are reporting, the consensus is clear: the game is buggy, poorly optimized, and underbaked. It currently has a review status of Mostly Negative on Steam, which is usually reserved for the most broken games, like Battlefield 2042.
Consider yourself warned if you want to jump into Joel and Ellie’s story on PC, especially if you just finished the excellent HBO series. For players who already have the game, there is a specific issue you should be aware of regarding Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) as well as your system requirements that go far beyond the recommended glasses.
A possible source of stuttering
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There are several problems with The last of us on your computer — lagging, crashing, and long loading times are chief among them. I experienced minor stuttering and long loading times, but never crashes. It’s not surprising that the game has problems on so many systems.
This is not the same problem as with games Gotham Knights experienced because they suffered from shader compilation issues. The last of us on PC, on the other hand, it takes a notoriously long time to precompile the shaders when you first load the game. For me it was about 30 minutes, but some users report waiting over two hours before the initial shader compilation finished.
Some users have speculated that the long loading times are related to bugs in the version of the Oodle decompression library which The last of us uses. Replacing the file associated with Oodle can obviously solve the longer load times, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for a hang problem.
The source of the lags and crashes is likely due to high CPU utilization and high video memory requirements. The system requirements only require a graphics card with 4GB of video memory, but I had a different experience. Even at 720p on the lowest setting, the game was consuming close to 7GB of video memory. In native resolution with the maximum setting, it consumed almost 14 GB.
Even if you have a GPU with 8GB of video memory — which, remember, includes graphics cards as powerful as the RTX 3070 Ti — there’s a good chance you’ll run out of video memory, even at modest settings. That’s one possible source of stuttering and lag, but there’s an even more pressing problem: your processor.
Increasing the size cannot help
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DLSS and FSR are super resolution tools that are meant to increase the number of frames per second by rendering the game at a lower resolution. Under normal circumstances, it works great, and with the right equipment, it works The last of us on the computer too. However, I imagine most computers will run into problems.
That’s the problem The last of us on PC is very heavy on your CPU. Even in full resolution on mine Alienware 34 QD-OLED, the game would hover between 30% to 50% CPU utilization. That’s more than many real-time strategy games, which are notoriously heavy on your CPU. If you turn on FSR or DLSS, that number goes up — I jumped to 70% territory after turning either on.
That’s extremely high for such a linear game. There are games that are prone to CPU bottlenecks like Marvel’s Spider-Man, but generally involve large open worlds with lots of simulation. The last of us is a linear experience, and while there are some CPU-related settings, they don’t improve performance. Even turning the game down to the lowest graphics settings didn’t change the CPU usage at all.
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What’s interesting is that I tested the game with an Intel Core i9-13900K, which is arguably one of the fastest gaming processors you can buy right now. Lower-end chips will struggle more, possibly increasing utilization and causing lags or crashes.
Anyway, back to FSR and DLSS. Both of these features work by rendering the game at a lower resolution. This is entirely a function of your graphics card reducing the load it has to carry. Consequently, this increases the load on your processor. Now, instead of your processor waiting on your graphics card, your graphics card is waiting on your processor. We have a CPU bottleneck.
This means that DLSS and FSR will not improve your performance, which is exactly what I noticed during testing. Turning on DLSS or FSR in their respective quality modes increased the framerate with the RTX 4080 and Core i9-13900K, but even switching to Ultra Performance mode with FSR 2 did nothing to increase my performance further. If you’re already bottlenecking at native resolution, turning on the super resolution feature won’t help.
We have a long way to go
Although it’s possible that the buggy version of Oodle will miraculously fix itself The last of us on a PC, the port has several other performance-related issues. High CPU and VRAM usage can reduce performance across the board, and spikes in both can lead to stuttering and hangups. Worse, tweaking the dense graphics menu doesn’t help optimize the game’s difficulty.
The Last of Us Part I PC players: we’ve heard your concerns and our team is actively investigating the multiple issues you’ve reported.
We will continue to update you, but our team prioritizes updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.
— Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) March 28, 2023
Naughty Dog is aware of the issue and is working on a fix, though it should be noted that the port was handled by Iron Galaxy — the same studio responsible for the infamous Arkham Knight PC connection. I’m sure there are patches coming to fix easy-to-spot issues like the Oodle library, but further optimization to reduce VRAM requirements and CPU usage is important to keep the game running on multiple systems.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn