DF Direct Weekly: The Last of Us Part 1 PC requirements hint at an impressive port

Late last week Naughty Dog revealed the recommended PC specs for The Last of Us Part 1, with a surprising amount of detail provided in their blog post – down to the exact hardware necessary to obtain 4K 60fps at ultra settings. While the blog post is in some ways self-explanatory and straightforward, reading between the lines there’s actually a fair amount we can discern about the port. That’s exactly what we did in DF Weekly #102, where PC nerd trio Alex, Rich and Oliver espoused some interesting possibilities ahead of the game’s release on PC in almost exactly two weeks’ time.

First up, the presence of DLSS and FSR 2.2 is a huge deal for PC players, as it means that users of any modern GPU will be able to play the game at higher frame-rates – particularly important for ‘heavy’ AAA games like this one – but perhaps equally as important, as it means that there will be a higher-quality alternative to the game’s usual TAA, which exhibits some break-up and shimmer on PS5. If these upscaling techniques are used at their maximum quality setting, then we’d expect a cleaner and more stable presentation overall, which would be a nice bonus.

Secondly, based on the presence of an ultra preset and the extremely high requirements for even 1440p 60fps – listed as the formerly $1000 RTX 2080 Ti – we can expect the game to offer some graphical advantages over the PS5 version which already looks great. Part of this will be the expectation to hit both 4K and 60fps on higher-end systems, whereas PS5 users have to choose between 4K 30fps or 1440p 60fps, but even with this in mind we’d expect to see some scaling beyond the PS5 version in terms of relatively-easy-to-tweak settings like draw distances, shadow quality and so on. It remains to be seen how impactful those changes would be, but there’s certainly some potential here for a sparkling PC port on high-end hardware – including a native ultrawide presentation in 21:9 or 32:9 aspect ratios, which as Alex points out during the show, often requires a significant time investment to implement in in-game cutscenes.