Naughty Dog has released a new patch for The Last of Us that weighs in at 49 GB but brings a number of improvements to its controversial PC port, including greater CPU performance, updates to texture fidelity on the Low and Medium presets, and, perhaps most excitingly for some players, reduced shader building times. Shader building times has been one of the biggest recurring complaints that players have had with the PC version of The Last of Us, with some experiencing ridiculous shader rebuild times that go on for as long as 3+ hours, but if the changelog for v1.0.5.0 is to be believed, that suffering should now be minimized, at least partially. This problem was apparently even worse on Radeon graphics cards, with an AMD-specific fix alluding to shaders taking an “abnormally long time” to load. “It’s fixed!” reads one post on the Steam forum, while another is titled “I give up.”
From a Naughty Dog support post:
For optimal improvements to your experience, please ensure you have the most up-to-date version of your respective driver. At the time of publishing these notes, the most recent versions are:
AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.4.3, which includes a fix for “longer than expected shader compilation time” in The Last of Us Part I
NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 531.79
- Reduced shader building times
- Optimized code to improve global CPU performance
- 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
We at Naughty Dog and our partners at Iron Galaxy are closely watching player reports to support future improvements and patches. We are actively optimizing, working on game stability, and implementing additional fixes which will all be included in regularly released future updates.