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The Last of Us on Steam Deck is not great

By - | Views: 52,158

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 On my Ryzen 7 5800X and NVIDIA 2080 Ti (Fedora KDE), it gives an out of date driver warning that can be ignored to begin with.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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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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27 comments
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Purple Library Guy Mar 29, 2023
Quoting: Lofty
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
That and, I sometimes get this feeling like the biggest and newest are kind of . . . too much for me?
Like, if I just want to kick back for a few hours, and, you know, relax playing a game, and what I'm being served up is almost a commitment to a lifestyle or some goddamn thing, I find myself just going back to some of the old reliable. This is true even with strategy games--I can't count how often I've just played a simple evening of Master of Orion because I didn't feel like I quite had the energy to keep track of my Stellaris empire.
Comandante Ñoñardo Mar 29, 2023
It doesn't surprise me considering who did the port, Iron Galaxy.
Remember the Batman Arkham Knight PC port fiasco?

What I don't understand is why Sony didn't assigned Nixxes Software for this port.
Nixxes belongs to Sony and is very well know for to make good pc ports.
kellerkindt Mar 30, 2023
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clatterfordslim Mar 30, 2023
I bought this and can only use my PS4 controller. XBOX 360 controller is not calibrated properly, to move character you end up pushing the left stick diagonally. PS4 controller works fine. Disappointed with the response, as this game is a Naughty Dog masterpiece. Though like with every game these days, there are bugs on different hardware. You would think with all the tech we have, that by now Graphic cards would not have to still rely on software to run the latest games. Will they ever build a Graphic Card that has the drivers already built into it? I've been running this game in 2048x1152 resolution and it runs better than in 1440p. Though my builds are not anything to ride home with. Currently saving up to upgrade my CPU to RYZEN 7 5700X 8 Cores 16 threads, Motherboard ASUS B550 -F, Ram up to 32GB. Have been playing this game in Windows, will try it out in Linux soon.
BlackBloodRum Mar 30, 2023
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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoIt doesn't surprise me considering who did the port, Iron Galaxy.
Remember the Batman Arkham Knight PC port fiasco?

What I don't understand is why Sony didn't assigned Nixxes Software for this port.
Nixxes belongs to Sony and is very well know for to make good pc ports.
Budget.
lejimster Mar 30, 2023
My friends being Playstation gamers have been recommending this game to me for years, but I refuse to spend money on something this broken. It's surprising and a shame how poor the port is when other recent Sony ports have been pretty good. Hopefully it will eventually get fixed up.


Last edited by lejimster on 30 March 2023 at 9:43 pm UTC
legluondunet Apr 1, 2023
once again excuses from Naugty dog and patch planned this next days:
https://twitter.com/Naughty_Dog/status/1641943183826509825
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