Sony has just released The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered on PC. Powered by Naughty Dog’s proprietary engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 572.83, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.3.2 drivers.
Nixxes and Iron Galaxy are currently responsible for the PC version of TLOU Part 2. And, the teams have added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can tweak the quality of Textures, Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, Reflections, and more. The game also supports Intel XeSS, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and AMD FSR 3.1. However, there aren’t any new PC-only Ray Tracing effects.
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the city area you encounter early in the game. This area has a lot of NPCs, so it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
At both 1080p and 1440p on Max Settings, all of our GPUs were able to run the game with over 60FPS. Yes, even the RTX 2080Ti was able to offer a 60FPS experience. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered is an old, non-RT game. Still, the game runs WAY better than The Last of Us Part I.
To give you an idea, the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti could not run the first The Last of Us game at 1080p/Ultra with 60FPS. And now, here we are with TLOU Part 2, running with 60FPS at 1440p on that same GPU. This is a HUGE improvement.
It’s also worth noting that although the game does not have any RT effects, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is noticeably faster than the RX 7900XTX. On the other hand, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT falls way behind the NVIDIA RTX 3080 in this title.
At 4K/Max Settings, you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX to game with 60FPS. On the NVIDIA camp, the RTX4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 had no trouble at all running the game with over 60FPS.
TLOU Part 2 Remastered seems to require over six CPU cores/threads. The game was completely unplayable, due to extreme stutters, on our simulated dual-core and quad-core systems. And although our framerates were higher than 70FPS on our hexa-core CPU, there were numerous stutters. Those stutters were significantly reduced once we moved to a CPU with eight cores.
Now, the reason my results are different between the CPU and GPU benchmarks is simple. You see, right when I finished my GPU benchmarks, my Windows 10 OS got corrupted. I tried everything to restore it, but I was unable to. My registry got corrupted, and the only solution was to reinstall Win10. However, I was previously using 21H2 (which ran faster than 22H2). Now, I’m using Win10 22H2. And that’s why the numbers are different in the CPU and GPU benchmarks.
Graphics-wise, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered looks great. As we all know, this game has some of the best pre-baked lighting you’ll ever see in a game. And, thanks to it, it can still look great. Yes, the game is basically five years old (as its first version came out in 2020). Despite that, this is a great-looking game. It’s not a graphical showcase (as we’ve seen more impressive games on PC these past couple of years). At the same time, though, it’s not a bad-looking game.
Before closing, I should note that the game does suffer from some traversal stutters. Moreover, the game will compile its shaders asynchronously. This may introduce some performance issues on CPUs that have few cores/threads. Yes, it’s good that you don’t have to wait a long time until you play the game. However, it would be best, at least in my opinion, if there was an optional setting to compile the shaders before starting it. Oh, and the keyboard and mouse work wonderfully from the get-go. Thank God this isn’t another “Uncharted” mess.
All in all, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered runs incredibly well on PC. This is miles beyond the problematic PC version of the first The Last of Us game. It’s not perfect as it suffers from some traversal stutters, and it has problems on CPUs with very few cores/threads. Overall, though, this is a great PC port. So, kudos to Nixxes and Iron Galaxy for delivering a game that can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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