Search for the The best Last of Us settings? You’ve come to the right place, because we’ve put the PC port of Naughty Dog through its paces. Balancing frame rate and fidelity isn’t as taxing as Joel and Ellie’s apocalyptic hugs, but spending more time in the options menu will save you some material heartache.
Before you splash your cash on Naughty Dog, check out The Last of Us system requirements. This will help you check if your gaming PC is up to the task, as you’ll need one of the best aftermarket graphics card to match PS5 performance. That said, you won’t need an Nvidia RTX 4080 to simply run the game, and our best setup tips will help you in your quest to increase fps at higher resolutions.
– Game News test machine: MSI MPG Trident AS 11th gaming PC, with Intel Core i7 11700F, MSI Ventus Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 32 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard and Windows 11.
The best Last of Us settings
Here are the best Last of Us settings on PC:
- Graphics Preset: Custom
- Animation quality: high
- Pull distance: medium
- Smart Object Detail Level: Fine
- Character Detail Level: High
- Level of detail of the environments: High
- Smart Object Texture Quality: Medium
- Character Texture Quality: High
- Texture quality of environments: medium
- Quality of VFX textures: average
- Texture filtering: 4x anisotropic
- Texture Sampling Quality: Medium
- Ambient Shadow Quality: Full Res
- Directional tint quality: medium
- Directional Shadow Resolution: Medium
- Directional Shadow Distance: Medium
- Image Based Lighting: Enabled
- Shadow Projector Resolution: Medium
- Point Light Shadow Resolution: Medium
- Bounce Lighting: Enabled
- Screen Space Shadow Quality: Medium
- Dynamic Shadows on Screen Space: Disabled
- Contact Shade Quality: Medium
- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion: Enabled
- Ambient Occlusion Denoising Quality: Low
- Screen Space Direction Occlusion: Enabled
- On-Screen Space Cone Plot: Enabled
- Screen Space Reflections: Off
The Last of Us Presets
Naughty Dog’s settings menu is dense, so opting for a Last of Us preset is a great way to work your way to better performance. The page features a resource meter that will visually tell you how much VRAM your graphics card has against the consumption of advanced graphics, so we suggest choosing an option that doesn’t turn the bar red. .
Our Last of Us benchmarks indicate that changing your preset from ultra to high will provide a substantial frame rate boost. While the RTX 3070 could produce a paltry 16fps average on the highest settings, we managed to bump it up to 21 by taking things down a notch. Theoretically that’s a performance boost of 31 per cent, and while that’s still not ideal, it does help us get a bit closer to that 60fps sweet spot.
Of course, going for a medium preset will facilitate even better frame rates, as it gave us 10fps on top of that previous improvement. If you’re not such a big fan of frame rates, or you’re just not used to the super satisfying frame rate heights associated with PC gaming, you could be content with playing over 30 ips. However, unless you’re playing on something like the Steam Deck, we encourage you to make a few more tweaks to get more frames from the stubborn PC port.
Putting The Last of Us preset to low will reduce VRAM usage and provide the biggest performance boost, but it’s an assault on the eyes. Sure, we’ve tested games that look good with the low settings enabled, but we’ve encountered various visual quirks when playing with the lowest settings enabled, such as pop-up textures and muddy graphics. If you’re playing at 1440p or 4K, we’ll avoid going that low on the presets, as you’re probably better off playing the PS4 version.
Our test team prefers the medium option mentioned above, as high and ultra are too spicy for the RTX 3070. However, if you’re looking for the best experience, you’ll want to use The Last of Us presets as a base. only a silver bullet, because there are ways to improve performance without compromise.
The Last of Us Nvidia DLSS
These days, it seems like AI scalers are almost a must-have, as they’ll let you hit higher frame rates without much warning. If you have a GeForce RTX graphics card, you can enable the Nvidia DLSS option in the “display” options menu and it will make all the difference. We’re running a 40% frame rate boost while using “Balanced” mode, so we think it’s worth enabling.
It’s worth noting that DLSS isn’t perfect and won’t always dynamically change resolutions fast enough that you don’t notice. You’ll likely see the occasional poster on a blurry wall or texture that lacks punch. However, if it gets you above the 60fps line without the whole thing looking like a PS3 demake, we’d say go for it.
The Last of Us AMD FSR
Unlike Nvidia DLSS, all graphics cards can access The Last of US AMD FSR settings, which means you’ll always have a scaler at your disposal. That said, it’s more visually noticeable than the GeForce tool when active, especially when dealing with fine details like hair. I find it a little too annoying, but it will help.
The Last of Us Traces the Distance
In an open-world game, we wouldn’t recommend compromising draw distance, but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to The Last of Us. outside and inside, so you might not notice much difference when going low. This helped us achieve an average of 74fps with DLSS enabled, and gameplay was noticeably smoother.
The Last of Us Shadow Quality
As you can probably see from our list of the best settings above, The Last of Us shadow settings are split into several options. Playing around with the quality, resolution, and distance options will help deliver a few extra frames, but we suggest keeping things at least average. Switching to low delivered up to 10 fps on top of our benchmark frame rate, but it also removed some of the pazazz from the PC port frames.
Texture quality The Last of Us
The Last of Us features wonderfully detailed textures that really pop, and compromising fidelity for framerate reasons feels like a cardinal sin on PC. Strangely, we didn’t see much performance benefit from the lower settings, but if you’ve splashed out on a card like the one in our Nvidia RTX 4090 review, we wouldn’t blame you for going ultra settings. .
The character quality of The Last of Us
We’d say the characters in The Last of Us are what make the doomsday drama special, and you’ll spend a lot of time staring at the back of Joel and Ellie’s neck. For this reason, it’s good to keep the settings associated with a medium and higher level, because the callback will remove any immersive definition.
the last patch of us
Are you waiting for the release of a Last of Us patch? Luckily, a hotfix has just been released that fixes some launch issues, but we’re not out of the poorly optimized forest yet. Players are still expressing their disappointment via negative Steam reviews, and the developer is still investigating the Last of Us building shader issue.
We will continue to test the port as new patches and fixes are released, and we hope to come up with more ways to increase frame rates and maintain fidelity. The best advice we can offer is to keep your graphics card’s VRAM in mind when choosing settings for The Last of Us on PC, as going too far can lead to crashes, bugs and Joel having a weird beard. .
Looking for advice on The Last of Us Steam Deck? We’ve got you covered, but you might want to wait until you buy the game specifically for Valve’s laptop.