The Last of Us, released there in 2013, was one of the biggest hits in Playstation history. Joel and Ellie’s saga through a post-apocalyptic world was so well received that the game was remade in the new generation of consoles, being released on Playstation 5 under the title of The Last of Us – Part 1, in the second half of 2022 Now it’s the PC’s turn. Is there a big difference between the releases?
O YouTuber Nick930 made an extremely complete video comparing both versions side by side in maximum graphic quality and 4K resolution. Check out the analysis we did based on the video below:
Analyzing the differences between versions of The Last of Us: Part 1
Models
The character models are the same. There are no visible changes between the PS5 version and the PC version, which is good, as the Playstation models are of absurd quality.
environments
The environments and scenarios of the game are also practically the same. There is a slight change, given by ambient occlusion settings, but textures remain at the same quality. A small improvement in the PC version exists in the distant vegetation: Grass, trees and plants in general maintain their quality when seen from afar, which is not a significant improvement, since there are few moments in the game that we can see vegetation from afar (Usually, the distant scenery is clogged with ruins of buildings and cars.)
Lighting
The volumetric lighting is higher in the Playstation 5 version than in the PC version, which could be the effect of a bug. On PS5, the lights penetrate the environments in an extremely realistic way, involving objects and pieces of the scenery. On the PC, the same thing happens, but in a worse and more checkered way.
shadows
We have a win for the PC version here, albeit a small one. Shadows are better, especially around character edges and natural details like trees and bushes.
Effects
The effects of fire, blood and gore remain the same in both versions, but the PS5 has superior “ripple” effects: when the character or an NPC enters the water, the waves depart from the character and bounce off objects more realistically in the version from PS5.
Performance
The main difference between the two versions is not in graphics, but in performance: The PC version is very poorly optimised. When opening the game for the first time, we have to wait between 30 minutes and up to 2 hours (depending on the power of the computer’s hardware) while the game compiles the shaders. During that time, our test computer here at Oficina da Net maintained a stable temperature of 100 degrees Celsius on the processor (i5-13600), behavior that we have never seen before.
A reminder that we will have a new hotfix live for The Last of Us Part I on PC tomorrow, and a patch on Friday.
We will share patch notes when the hotfix is live, and let you know some of what to expect in Friday’s patch ahead of its launch.
— Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) April 3, 2023
The main performance issue is general: the game needs an extremely powerful graphics card and processor to play in 4K, we’re talking RTX 4070 Ti and up! When we enter new areas, processor usage goes to 100% and combat freezes, similar to the YouTuber’s experience in the comparison video.
Here’s hoping Naughty Dog fixes the game’s performance issues, as they promised to do in a tweet.
