The Last of Us Part I launched on PC nearly three months ago. Naughty Dog's masterpiece action/adventure game, remade for PlayStation 5, had been long awaited by PC gamers, but a plethora of technical issues made its launch less successful than it could have been.
Some of the most glaring problems came from high VRAM requirements, underwhelming textures at medium and low settings, extremely long shader compilation times, and mediocre CPU optimization. Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy (the studio that led development on The Last of Us Part I for PC) have released several patches to improve the game's performance across the areas. However, the overall result is still not ideal, as noted in a recent Digital Foundry test based on the latest major patch (v1.0.5).
The Last of Us Part I is far from the only recent PC game to provide unsatisfying performance. As you might remember, modder PureDark took it upon himself to boost performance by implementing upscalers in games that didn't naturally support them.
It all began with Stunlock Studios' V Rising, the first game modded with NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR support. Then, PureDark added DLSS, FSR, and Intel XeSS support to bigger games like Resident Evil Village (later extended to all RE Engine games), Fallout 4, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
This year, he also published an Elden Ring upscaler mod, though the performance boost potential leveled up after NVIDIA's decision to share the DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) plugin publicly at GDC 2023.
PureDark now had the ability to inject DLSS 3 mods in games that lacked it. The first one was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, then Elden Ring, though perhaps the most notorious example is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Respawn's game suffered from similar technical issues to The Last of Us Part I, and PureDark's mod managed to nearly double that game's performance with the injection of DLSS 3. Later, he also replaced the game's native FSR 2 with DLSS 2 (Super Resolution), which improved the visual quality.
The Last of Us Part I has no such problem since it includes DLSS 2 by default. However, it could definitely use DLSS 3, as demonstrated by PureDark's latest showcase. As you can see in the video above, the game's performance on his GeForce RTX 4070Ti doubles when Frame Generation is activated. There doesn't seem to be any visual downside to the implementation, and the modder said he'd release the upscaler in the next few days.
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to testing it on my own, hoping for yet another magic trick. Granted, the high-end GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards probably don't need much of a boost, but NVIDIA has just released the RTX 4060Ti, and the RTX 4060 is coming in July. Those entry-level GPUs would certainly welcome the extra performance.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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