The Last of Us Steam Deck

Fresh The Last of Us PC Patch Nets Steam Deck Verified Badge

The Last of Us PC is now Steam Deck Verified. That comes after a new patch focused mostly on getting performance where it needs to be across PC and Steam Deck. A bunch of crash fixes and other issues were also fixed.

Here’s what the Naughty Dog and their PC partners, Iron Galaxy, did on the Steam Deck side of things:

  • Overall improvements to performance while playing on Steam Deck
  • Addressed a memory leak issue that could cause crashes
  • Fixed an issue where certain button prompts would be misaligned
  • Fixed an issue where changing (Options > Graphics > Graphics Preset) could trigger an intense lighting effect
  • Fixed an issue where in-game HUD did not match Steam Deck Performance Overlay FPS value
  • Fixed a crash that could occur during loading screens
  • Effects Density now defaults to Very Low instead of Low
  • [Lakeside Resort] Fixed a crash that could occur at the start of a cutscene
  • [Pittsburgh] Fixed a crash that could occur at certain checkpoints
  • [The Outskirts] Fixed an issue where locked FPS could make it difficult to move pushable objects

As for performance? The folks at SteamDeckHQ took a quick look post-patch and noted performance is more stable, with the frame rate staying at 30 FPS more often with slight dips. It won’t run perfectly, but the patch is a definite improvement from how the game ran before.

And here are some of the performance tweaks for regular PC users:

  • Optimizations to improve global CPU and GPU performance throughout the game
  • Overall improvements to texture and environment loading 
  • Improved shader compilations times

Naughty Dog also says more updates are coming. “We are actively optimizing, working on game stability, and implementing additional fixes which will all be included in regularly released future updates,” the devs write at the bottom of these patch notes.

The current list of known performance issues includes:

  • Loading shaders takes longer than expected
  • Performance and stability is degraded while shaders are loading in the background
  • Older graphics drivers leads to instability and/or graphical problems
  • Game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements
  • A potential memory leak
  • Mouse and camera jitter for some players, depending on hardware and display settings
  • Corrupted-appearing/neon textures in game