The Last of Us Part 1 Update 1.0.5 Improves Performance on Steam Deck!

When The Last of Us Part 1 came out, we were super excited to see how the game would play and perform on the Steam Deck. Unfortunately, the port that came to PC had some major issues all around, especially with performance on the Deck. Naughty Dog has been making a lot of headway fixing the port up with lots of optimizations for the CPU and GPU, fidelity improvements, and random bugfixes. None of these patches really helped the Deck's performance of the game...until the patch yesterday!

Version 1.0.5 is the newest update and with it comes a new group of fixes and optimizations. These include reduced shader building times, improvements to load times overall, reduced VRAM impact of texture quality settings, optimized content for improved performance across different levels, and optimized code to improve global CPU performance. When put together, all of this actually seems to improve performance of the game pretty massively on the Steam Deck.

While I haven't done extensive testing yet, there are a couple of notable areas I noticed a very big performance increase in. In the opening, I was experiencing around 22 FPS throughout it and around 17 FPS when getting to the theatre area. With this update, and the same exact settings (lowest), I was at a solid 30 FPS with around 28 FPS at the theatre. I did need to set a GPU clock speed frequency of 1200 to smooth the framerate out.

There could be some instances of slowdowns further into the game and I am playing currently to test the game throughout, but so far I have been getting better performance all around! It has definitely been much more playable so far, almost to the point where I could recommend the game with some compromises to visual quality! If you already own the game, I highly recommend updating and trying it out.

For those interested, here is the full changelog for the 1.0.5 update!

The Last of Us Part 1 - 1.0.5 Update Changelog:

• Optimized content to improve performance across several levels
• Improved level loading to help reduce the amount of 'Please Wait' and loading screens
• Added a new Effects Density setting, which adjusts the density and number of non-critical visual effects (Options > Graphics)
• 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

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