The Last of Us Part 1 Specs + Possible Performance

Yesterday, Naughty Dog announced the PC features and specs for their upcoming PC port, The Last of Us Part 1. After reading it, it seems like they are taking a lot of care in this version of the game, which only makes me more excited than before!

Let's start with the confirmed features. Not only are the adjustable graphical options coming with the game, they have confirmed that the game will feature AMD FSR 2.2 support. This is significant here as bigger games like this will definitely need the extra help running on the Steam Deck. There will also be Ultra-Wide monitor support for both 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios, which is always nice. The game will also feature DualSense support through a wired connection, so you can feel all those special effects through the controller.

Next, we have the PC specs. These show the minimum required parts that your computer should have to run the game at certain benchmarks. And I am pleased to see the minimum here, since this is within the mark the Steam Deck can handle!

Now these are really achievable, especially when you consider games like the Dead Space Remake asking for a better CPU, GPU, and same RAM, all while running well on the Deck. But there's a bit more to digest here, so let's dive a little deeper into how the game could perform.

The Last of Us Part 1 - Possible Performance

There are three key components to look into when it comes to how the game could perform that I will take a look at: Developer/Publisher history, similar game performance, and confirmed graphical options. With these three, I believe we can make a general inference about how the game could perform on the Steam Deck.

This performance theorizing is purely an opinion and not indicative of the final release. We will not officially know performance until the game is released and in our hands, but until than, here is what we can gather from what we have in front of us:

First, we look at the developer/publisher history, which means Naughty Dog and PlayStation studios. On the developer side, Naughty Dog has only released the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves collection on Steam. While they have developed many more games, these were primarily on PlayStation consoles and not on PC, so we won't take a look at those. While it did have some rough spots, the game was VERY playable while looking incredible. This is also a game that has similar specs, albeit slightly less demanding, and still runs very well.

Naughty Dog has proven themselves with optimization thanks to this game, but PlayStation has been on point too. Other than Returnal, when it comes to Steam Deck performance, PlayStation has been crushing it with PC support. The Spider-Man games, God of War, Days Gone, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Sackboy all run really well on the Steam Deck, which feels like a miracle considering the games are gigantic (especially God of War and Spider-Man).

With that in mind, let's move on to similar games. For this, I will use Uncharted and Dead Space Remake. Uncharted is a similar-ish game and while it has slightly lower specs, it uses the same in-house engine that The Last of Us Part 1 does. As covered above, the game can run fantastic on the Steam Deck at 30 FPS or 40, with some tweaks to graphical quality.

I wanted to find a game that has higher specs, but decent optimization to match the Naughty Dog quality, which came to Dead Space Remake. The game runs really well on the Deck just like Uncharted, but is asking for a minimum GTX 1070 GPU and Ryzen 5 2600x CPU, which is more than what The Last of Us is asking. From these examples, and taking into account the optimization that Naughty Dog and PlayStation studios puts out, I would consider the minimum specs to be within what the Deck can handle.

Finally, I wanted to look at what PC features the game will have. As mentioned above, The Last of Us Part 1 will have the normal slate of graphics options that can be configurable, but Naughty Dog has also confirmed that FSR 2.2 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) will be integrated into the game. This is exciting since they are using the newest version of FSR 2, which includes some improved logic that reduces high-velocity ghosting and improved disocclusion detection.

FSR 2 will allow us to render at a lower resolution and upscale the game to a higher resolution, saving a lot of rendering power so we can push higher quality and framerate stability.

So with all of that taken into account, I would say The Last of Us Part 1 will be very playable on the Steam Deck. Thanks in part to Naughty Dog and PlayStation Studio's commitment to optimization, as well as the inclusion of FSR 2.2, I believe it won't have any issue being able to perform. As to how well, I feel it will be similar to the Uncharted collection. For The Last of Us, A 30 FPS build that can house medium graphics settings with FSR on quality and a 40 FPS build that utilizes low settings with FSR on balanced seem to be within the realm of possibility and not drain the battery too much.

I will mention again that all of this is speculation and NOT confirmed performance. This is all inferring based on data collected from similar games, game features, and history of the developer/publisher. But I would say, with all of this, the chances of it running well are very high!

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