A short, sad and true story
Naughty Dog is a game developer that has been with PlayStation from the beginning. The box office adventures of the striped jamraj, later the duo Jack & Daxter , followed by a radical change. This breakthrough was Uncharted – the series of games strongly influenced the sales of Sony PlayStation 2 and 3 consoles. However, with the seventh generation, they added one more franchise, The Last of Us . The title squeezed the last sweats out of the console, i.e. it went beyond the potential capabilities of the Cell processor. A remaster intended for PS4 and now for PS5 is a completely different experience, but it’s not the first such a powerful brand to close the life of a console in a given generation, and spread its wings only in the next. I could bore you now how the naughty dog lost his rights toCrash Bandicoot , murdered his second platformer, and developed a Tomb Rider competitor . However, we are interested in the release of The Last of Us on PC, which caused a huge stir and controversy. I will try to specify all this, assess and highlight what went wrong. There will be no story today.
Hardware Requirements…
We have entered an era where 16GB of RAM is becoming the bare minimum. To understand it better, in this section we will trace the main three parameters of the last three generations of Sony consoles and introduce you to the current top designs. Yes, there will be a lot of numbers and obscure abbreviations, but I will try to present everything so that even a layman can understand it.
We start with PS3: Cell processor 3.2GHz; RSX graphics chip with 256MB GDDR3 and 256MB RAM directly synchronized with the processor. On paper, this is the end of the life of the Intel Pentium 4 from 20 years ago, yet the device is technologically much more modern, and thus more efficient. What’s more, in the year of the console’s release, the top graphics chips had 512MB of RAM.
PS4 is already a small stove, and it looks like this: AMD “Jaguar” x86-64 processor, 8 cores; graphics chip 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD Radeon; 8GB GDDR5 RAM. A lot of important data is classified or not directly presented. Regarding the processor, the number of cores is given, but to find out what its potential clock speed is, you must already explore what Jaguar technology was. This provided for 1GHz, but for the core and the so-called multitasking, which means that we have a synchronous unit here with a total power of 8GHz. The same is true for the graphics system – official data only gives the number of teraflops (a unit of processor computing power), and not a specific variable in the form of VRAM, i.e. the operating memory of the graphics core. Adequately, until recently, the most commonly used graphics card in PC (GTX 1060 TFLOPS) has a level of 4.4 with VRAM 3GB or 6GB DDR5. It is very important to understand the gulf and difference in use between desktop and console. This is a good time to mention that consoles began to lose this quality war in the middle of the life of the sixth generation, i.e. PlayStation 2.
PS5 is already a full-fledged stove, but: AMD Zen 2 8-core processor – up to 3.5 GHz; graphics chip AMD RDNA 2 GPU 36 Cus 2.23GHz, 10.28 TFLOPS; 16GB GDDR6 RAM. This is where it gets interesting. A powerful octa-core processor, with a fast graphics chip, but again the operating memory is actually VRAM only in the newer technology, because DDR6. It is also worth noting the speed of the graphics core of 2.23GHz, adequate desktop graphics systems from the middle price range, i.e. RTX3060, have an average of 1.8GHz.
Top PC: Intel I9 13900K processor 24 cores, clock speed 3.0-5.8GHz per core; graphics chip RTX 4090 24GB VRAM DDR6 with 82.6 TFLOPS; operating memory depends on the platform. I’ll dwell on that last one a bit. Until recently, these were DDR4 chips with clock speeds up to 3600MHz, current platforms support very fast DDR5 chips that start at 4200MHz. So what is this RAM in a PC? Well, it is an intermediate communication unit between the processor, graphics card and hard disk. It can even save regular files for faster use if properly invoked by the application. Someone here in a moment may say: ok, but in the console you can also switch between applications or games and it will remember the point where it ended. Yes, you can, but this is due to the appropriate programming of memory allocation in relation to the possibilities.
You’re probably wondering now: what’s the point? The fact that you need to understand how consoles really work, and how computers: desktops or laptops. Toys like PlayStation, Xbox, Switch are units specialized in efficient graphics rendering in real time. I had to provide all this tedious data to emphasize that this is nothing more than a specialized PC with a graphics chip that works on a similar principle to the integrated ones (allocates VRAM from the available memory). Voices will rise soon: hola, hola, why can’t the integrated stove handle games like a console? Simple, a computer is a universal device with a wide range of applications, its intended operation is not rendering, but stable work on many applications at the same time.
So what about The Last of Us ?
Before I sat down to this position, I read and watched many popular youtubers related to the gaming industry, and not only computer equipment. Each of them emphasized that this production is an optimization nightmare and it is not the first one this year. The proud statement of PC Master Race just swallowed its own tail and choked on it, but are you sure? Personally, I have a medium: Ryzen 5 2600, GTX 1660Ti, 16GB RAM 3200MHz. This configuration does not hold 60 fps, it looks nice, despite the descent with settings between medium and low) in 1080p resolution, even nicer than on PS4 (not PR0), because I was able to play this version. Other comparisons will be more in relation to external materials. The PRO version supposedly holds frames in FullHD, but it has a quality mode and we are talking about 30 FPS with 4K upscaled. PS5 supposedly works in 4K natively, and the quality/performance mode is the only difference whether there is ray tracing (advanced light ray tracing system) or not. However, I allowed myself to go a step further and check the title with a friend with only a slightly better computer, namely: Ryzen 9 5950, RTX 2060 Super and 64GB Ram 3600MHz. On this unit in 1080p the game runs stably on ultra. Why such a difference? It’s just a port that forces the PC to act as if it were a console.
Well, the game takes all available VRAM, uses the operating memory as a link, because the graphics processor shows almost zero load, and everything is processed by the processor. This creates drama. Naughty Dog and Sony are big companies, strong brands, they can afford the approach of Rockstar, who dragged out the launch of GTA 5 on PC for years, due to the failure of the GTA 4 port , to do everything right. Sure, it’s a demanding game, it’s still used in benchmarks, but it’s been optimized, and TLoU is a PS3, PS4, and PS5 emulator all in one. However, this is not the first such case, the first release for PC Resident Evil 4 was also an emulation that did not even support mouse aiming.
Are you sure I’m right?
This is a conundrum; after all, exclusive Sony PC games have appeared that work properly or at least decently. Horizon: Zero Dawn from Guerrilla Games, God Of War from Santa Monica, Marvel’s Spider-Manfrom Insomniac are items that show that you can make a good port. Only all of the above-mentioned titles have a much newer engine than our bane, originally released on PS3 with a CELL processor, where it is worth mentioning that this was a technology very much disliked by the developers. I am convinced that this is a key problem, as can be seen from the emulation capabilities of this console even today. We have waited over 10 years to have software that will work like ePSXe and ePSXe2 (the most popular emulators PSX/One and PS2 respectively provide comfortable play of most titles from the library), and yet only the most popular items work somehow. This does not mean that it cannot be fixed, but Sony clearly needs to open up more to the potential of other platforms. They’re selling more and more of their gems, but you can see that they do not properly set the creators for this possibility, so that they have this in mind during production and can prepare the product in advance. On the other hand, maybe it’s just Naughty Dog who can’t make games for PC because he has no experience, although Sony can afford to pay the right porting company.
To sum up this overly long technological argument…
I have a huge problem with the evaluation of the product I received. On the one hand, it’s a great game with a good story, nice gameplay, but it doesn’t work as expected. This is the bane of the aforementioned PC Master Race formula. Yes, a desktop computer will be more efficient than a console, yes, it will have better results in games, but The Last of Us shows that not always. This is not the only optimization gaffe this year. For example, Star Wars Jedi: Survivoralso has problems, and on all platforms. The bottom line is to wait and hope that as players we don’t get carried away and become paying beta testers, which is what gamedev has been aiming for in recent years. Finally, I will add that there are regular patches that improve performance and optimization, but you can see these changes mainly on top units and high resolutions.
