If you love the PC version of The Last of Us Part 1, but stopped playing it because of technical issues, now is probably the time to dust it off. That's because Naughty Dog has released yet another new update that promises to improve performance.
This time, special attention was given to shader building times, the main highlight of Patch 1.0.5. The game should now load faster, especially if you play on a PC using AMD hardware.
Furthermore, there's a new setting called "Effects Density" that adjusts the number and density of non-critical visual effects. If you're not sporting the latest and greatest NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, you may want to tinker with this setting to see if it improves performance on your end.
To maximize the optimizations in Patch 1.0.5, Naughty Dog advises you to download the latest graphics driver for your PC. This is even more so when you have an AMD GPU because the latest driver (Adrenalin Edition 23.4.3) includes a fix for "longer than expected shader compilation time."
When looking at community feedback, It looks like this update is a success. One user stated that their saved games loaded much faster than before. However, they also noted that the shaders still take a while to load even on highest-end systems. Be that as it may, Naughty Dog seems to have taken a step in the right direction.
Changelog
- Reduced shader building times
- Optimized code to improve global CPU performance
- Optimized content to improve performance across several levels
- Improved level loading to help reduce the amount of 'Please Wait' and loading screens
- Increased crowd sizes on Low and Medium Ambient Character Density settings and added a Very Low option (Options > Graphics)
- Implemented additional scalability tuning for Low and Medium in-game Graphics settings
- Reduced the VRAM impact of texture quality settings, allowing most players to increase their texture quality settings or experience improved performance with their current settings
- Fixed a crash that would occur on boot on Windows 11
- Fixed a crash that could occur on Intel Arc
- Fixed a crash that may occur when starting a New Game in Left Behind prior to the completion of shader building
- Corrected an issue where pointing the camera at the floor while aiming would cause the player and camera to visually stutter
- Fixed an issue where Sniping Sensitivity settings were not applying to all scoped weapons. Additionally, Sniping Sensitivity has been renamed to Scoped Sensitivity (Options > Controls > Mouse Camera Sensitivity)
- Fixed an issue where players could not click on Jump To Unbound when prompted in the custom controls settings (Options > Controls > Input > Customize Controls)
- Fixed an issue where changing Graphics settings (Options > Graphics > Graphics Preset) during gameplay wouldn't restart the player at the correct checkpoint
- Fixed an issue where adjustments to Lens Flare (Options > Graphics > Visual Effects Settings > Lens Flare) were not not applied
- [Pittsburgh] Fixed an issue where players may consistently fall out-of-world when restarting at the checkpoint in the bookstore
- [Left Behind] Fixed an issue where players may get soft locked when jumping into the electrified water
- AMD-Specific
- Implemented improvements to load times
- Fixed an issue where shaders may take an abnormally long time to load
Have you downloaded Patch 1.0.5 already? How's your experience so far? Let us know in the comments below!
