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The Last of Us on Steam Deck is not great

By - | Views: 52,145

Here we are, another big release on Steam and sadly it's just seemingly not a good experience from my early testing. Even though it seemed like we might see good support, the result is nothing of the sort.

Starting with the big nuisance: even though you've just downloaded it, you won't be ready to play. It will take around an hour to build the shaders on the main menu, something you'll need to do, otherwise you're likely to see worse performance. In my testing, you definitely want to wait on that being done too. Before it was done the performance was far more erratic and it ended up slowing down to a 1FPS crawl during one attempt.

Apart from that, it has the same issue some other bigger games have where the RAM will fill up to around 14/14.1GB as noted on the Steam Deck's performance HUD and then crash completely, often taking the Steam Deck with it for a full reboot.

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Valve did give it a special Proton Hotfix, which doesn't seem to have done enough to make it properly playable or be something I can recommend at this time.

As for how it runs on desktop Linux? On my Ryzen 7 5800X and NVIDIA 2080 Ti (Fedora KDE), it gives an out of date driver warning that can be ignored to begin with. Then it took a good 30 minutes (almost to the dot) to do the shaders even with this clearly much more powerful system. When you only have a 2 hour refund window on Steam, that's not good. Now think about people who do genuinely swap between PC and Steam Deck, practically the entire refund window gone to see if you have issues with it.

For desktop though, you can of course get much better performance and at least on the Linux side, it actually seems to run reasonably well even at 2560x1440 with FSR set to Balanced it can mostly stick around 60FPS.


Both shots were actually 60FPS, but Plasma screenshot spikes the FPS down.

Seems it's quite a problematic port overall, as the Steam user reviews instantly went down to Mixed (Edit: and now "Mostly Negative"), with many people on Windows reporting problematic performance and constant crashes.

You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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27 comments
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TheSHEEEP Mar 29, 2023
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Reset the "Crappy PC port of major title" timer!
Sojiro84 Mar 29, 2023
Quoting: KlaasWhen was the last big release where everything worked on release? You spend more money and are rewarded with a miserable experience.

I would say the Resident Evil 4 remake is a perfect release. That game has amazing performance and, as far as I could tell, no bugs or other game breaking issues.

But that remake is a exception these day's. The default release method of most game developers is launching a broken mess and then we have to wait and hope for it to get fixed.


Last edited by Sojiro84 on 29 March 2023 at 6:47 am UTC
grumpytoad Mar 29, 2023
Quoting: KlaasI would say the Resident Evil 4 remake is a perfect release. That game has amazing performance and, as far as I could tell, no bugs or other game breaking issues.

Really? I couldn't even get to the settings menu without RE4 hard hanging my deck.
legluondunet Mar 29, 2023
Once again, a console game that are badly ported on PC.
I would like to buy it day one, but finally, after reading comments here and elsewhere, I will wait until they optimized the game.
I don't want to buy a game full price that is not optimized and buggy, PC gamers deserve as respect as console gamers.


Last edited by legluondunet on 29 March 2023 at 1:55 pm UTC
BlackBloodRum Mar 29, 2023
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Quoting: legluondunetOnce again, a console game that are badly ported on PC.
I would like to buy it day one, but finally, after reading comments here and elsewhere, I will wait until they optimized the game.
I don't want to buy a game full price that is not optimized and buggy, PC gamers deserve as respect as console gamers.
I agree. I was waiting for this game also and was going to buy it on release if it worked with Linux.

Well.. it works with Linux. Terribly. But it also works terribly on Windows apparently, so that's fair.

In any case. I'll wait.
lectrode Mar 29, 2023
Quoteit has the same issue some other bigger games have where the RAM will fill up to around 14/14.1GB

Sounds like something that would potentially be fixed by that RADV RAM usage bug.

As far as shader compilation in concerned, isn't that something normally taken care of automatically on the Steam Deck due to Valve pre-compiling those specifically for Steam Deck users? Surprised that isn't currently another download.


Hopefully it's just short term fresh port issues that they can resolve soon.
Klaas Mar 29, 2023
Quoting: lectrodeAs far as shader compilation in concerned, isn't that something normally taken care of automatically on the Steam Deck due to Valve pre-compiling those specifically for Steam Deck users?
Do they really compile them centrally? AFAIK the files that are shared are generated on the users' systems.
Grogan Mar 29, 2023
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For the refund window, I would think that if you used up your 2 hour play time compiling shaders and troubleshooting, that would be a special case for consideration. They state the 2 hour/2 week general rule, but also indicate that there's wiggle room. This is their wording:

QuoteValve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any title that is requested within 14 days of purchase and has been played for less than 2 hours. Even if you fall outside of the refund rules we've described, you can submit a request and we'll take a look at it.


Last edited by Grogan on 29 March 2023 at 5:24 pm UTC
Lofty Mar 29, 2023
Quoting: KlaasWhen was the last big release where everything worked on release? You spend more money and are rewarded with a miserable experience.

I wonder if this is why retro gaming has become so big. Things just work and are mostly without bugs, even then the glitches/bugs are often funny. Ohh and you can game in 4k on an old PC still
grumpytoad Mar 29, 2023
I wonder if we'll ever get to a point where game companies provide binary shader cache downloads for the steam deck, since it's a known platform, to avoid the long compile times. I recall Valve already doing this for a recent game (was it dead space?)
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