The Last of Us Part 1 made it to PC in somewhat disastrous fashion, though later upgrades did improve the game substantially. Today marks the release of The Last of Us Part 2, and we were interested to see whether porting specialists Nixxes were able to deliver a better experience on launch – and how many legacy issues remain.
Part 2 certainly makes a more positive first impression, without the extreme issues that caused us to recommend against buying the first game on launch, but there are still some technical continuities here that drag the package down. Nixxes came in late to the port’s development to add in their own fixes, which are evident, but some things are still taken wholesale from the previous port handled by Iron Galaxy.
A great example is the game’s options menu, which looks to sport a different look but actually delivers the same mix of settings as the previous port – with some new additions including DLSS frame generation and dynamic resolution scaling, the latter from Nixxes libraries. As with the prior game, there are plenty of tweakables here, but there’s minimal scaling above and beyond the capabilities of the PlayStation 5 release. Screen space shadows and contact shadows are some of the few notable additions here, and do provide a small bump to visuals – helped by the higher overall image quality allowed on the PC platform by running at arbitrary resolutions.
The Last of Us Part 2 is also almost uniquely demanding in terms of the amount of GPU horsepower required to equal the PS5 version, in comparison to other releases that have targeted both PS5 and PC. The official system requirements suggest an RTX 3060 for 1080p 60fps gameplay, but these medium settings correspond to graphics that are worse in many ways than that of the PS4 release. For example, SSR exhibits full-size crosshatching not found in the PS4 release, and there are similar visual downgrades for flashlight bounce lighting, subsurface scattering and more.