Bonus Material: The Last of Us Part 1 Background Loading Makes CPU Problems Worse (Patreon)

Hi everyone, it's Rich here! This small and somewhat bizarre video is part of our look into what's gone wrong with The Last of Us Part 1. Essentially, to get a good experience on par with the console version or better, you need a CPU far more powerful than PlayStation 5's and GPU of at least 11GB. 

It's the CPU side of the equation that is most egregious because you never quite know why performance is low and then suddenly much better - but you will by watching the video above. Essentially, the game is background streaming and decompressing, adding an additional - costly - burden to the CPU. If you watch the video play out above, you'll see how moving from one area to the next causes a CPU hit, which gradually lessens as the loading completes.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is pretty badly affected by this, while the Ryzen 7 5800X3D effectively delivers twice the performance - I honestly think this is one of THE classic AMD products of all-time. This is actually based on a system using circa 2018 memory and motherboard. By upgrading the 3600 to the 5800X3D, my old PC is new again and can even power past TLOU's deficiencies.

As for our TLOU coverage, we can't do a video similar to Alex's usual content. For a start, there are over 40 quality settings. Secondly, patches are coming in thick and fast. We're going to use the Retro PC Time Capsule format to show a couple of PCs of varying performance levels alongside PS5 and present a different type of coverage. I think it should work, but let's see how we get on when we come to filming it!

Downloads: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/bonus-material-the-last-of-us-part-1-background-loading-makes-cpu-problems-worse