The Last of Us Part 1 on PC puts us in a somewhat difficult situation at Digital Foundry. How can you produce a technical review for a game that is essentially unfinished and - at the time of writing - has already received two hotfixes? We're told that a further patch is coming next week that should have more significant improvements, so the best we can provide is a snapshot of how the game looks right now, based on testing conducted last Friday. We'll return to the game if there's a noticeable improvement, but in the short term, we've got to move on to other projects.
Our snapshot - taken on Friday, March 31st - is embedded on the page below, taking the form of a limited playthrough of the game carried out on three systems. At the forefront sits the game as it plays on what is close to best-of-the-best PC hardware. That's my own test kit, featuring a Core i9 12900K, 6000MT/s DDR5 and Nvidia's RTX 4090. Alex Battaglia plays through simultaneously using a more mainstream-level PC system based on a Ryzen 5 3600, with 3200MT/s DDR4 and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super. Meanwhile, sitting pretty on PlayStation 5 in performance mode is our #FriendAndColleague, John Linneman.
We've got an hour of real-time comparisons, CPU tests, GPU analysis and much more, in the embedded video below, but what I'm going to do in this piece is attempt to summarise how the port is right now and what needs to happen to get the code into shape, comparable with some of Sony's most impressive ports - including Marvel's Spider-Man and Days Gone.