The Last of Us Part 1 on PC arrived towards the end of March in a pretty desperate state - a good experience only available to those with more powerful hardware, with profound issues facing gamers on more mainstream components. Progress has been made, however, across a series of patches and we thought it might be a good time to check in on the port to deliver an update on the game's current quality level. There's a lot of good news to impart here, but also some lingering issues - and we're concerned that they may never be addressed.
But let's address the good news first. At launch, there were profound issues with texture quality on 8GB graphics cards - which is highly problematic bearing in mind how many of them are in the market. Setting texture quality to high bust through the GPU's VRAM limit, resulting in tremendous stuttering issues. The alternative was to drop back to medium or even low quality textures, depending on your resolution - the problem being that the quality level looked more like 'ultra low'. In fact, textures from the PS3 original were more highly detailed.
I'd venture to suggest that this issue is now resolved. Medium textures now look absolutely fine, with only a minimal hit to quality compared to the high preset. Optimisations to memory management now mean that 8GB GPU owners can actually use the high texture preset instead if they wish, which gives a look very close indeed to the PlayStation 5 version. Naughty Dog deserves praise for delivering this. It demonstrates how PC scaling should work, and why we should not blindly assert that 8GB GPUs are now obsolete.