The Last of Us now Unsupported on Steam Deck, bad look for Valve and Naughty Dog

I got it with my RX 7900XTX, and, um, yeah.
While reasonably playable (pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, i7 8700K, 32GB RAM), there's some odd stuff going on.
For one, the game only sees 8GB of the card's 24GB.
There's intermittent audio crackle and as reported by many other users, initial shader compilation after launching the game takes ages. Probably 30 mins on my system.

I also had to knock it down from ultra at 2560x1440 to high, as there were regular, drastic frame dips.
There's blurry textures all over the place that take ages to pop in to high res, making the game look like some of those 15-year old Unreal Engine games.

I mean, I know my CPU and motherboard are a little long in the tooth now, and probably bottle-necking the card, but I still expected a little better than this.

On the bright side, no crashes so far.

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

Valve probably tested it. But i think theyr returned list of problems and Naughty Dog promised they fix it before release...

Blame SONY for this. They choose the worst porting company ever.

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.


Last edited by denyasis on 5 April 2023 at 1:36 am UTC

It's good that it's now marked unsupported, but it should mark it's unsupported on PC in general, as I get the idea from those that play on windows that it just plain sucks. And it sucks so hard that Naughty Dog apologized for the current state it is in.

I did a full play through on Linux and while there were some minor bugs and crashes, the only really bad thing is the super long shader compile, but otherwise I really enjoyed it, sure there were some fumbles and the Steam Deck side of things how valve handled it are somewhat inexcusable, the game in general I think is fine, and people really do need to adjust their expectations on the settings, even lowering them down a bit to get bit better performance the game looks really good.

Sad to see another example marring pc gaming, and glad we have GOL calling these issues out early

Really despise the whole fuck it we will patch it to playable at some point. Just because they can attitude can't blame game Devs for that. That smacks of publisher saying I have sales targets to meet push it out the door and patch it. Some advantages of the pre wide spread broadband days they had to have it be playable out the door. Well maybe except Troika who went bust when vampire bloodlines came out literally two days after the game was on store selves bought it and played it's emense jank long before the fan patches that make it work were around.

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.

Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?

Really despise the whole fuck it we will patch it to playable at some point. Just because they can attitude can't blame game Devs for that. That smacks of publisher saying I have sales targets to meet push it out the door and patch it. Some advantages of the pre wide spread broadband days they had to have it be playable out the door. Well maybe except Troika who went bust when vampire bloodlines came out literally two days after the game was on store selves bought it and played it's emense jank long before the fan patches that make it work were around.

Yeah, for those old enough to remember (Pepperidge farm remembers); developers / publishers used to actually deliver games that mostly worked when they were played. There wasn't an easy way to get patches out to players, so they had to make damn sure things worked right. Being able to download patches off the internet kind of ruined a lot of that.

Most impressive thing I still remember, is for some random reason I actually registered my copy of Ultima IX. They sent me a new CD with the patched version plus some extra stuff!

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.

Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?

There's an earlier article about it, but basically, there's no requirement that a dev or publisher put it through the process although Valve might do it on their own. From the article above, the publisher/dev hadn't submitted it yet.

I got it with my RX 7900XTX, and, um, yeah.
While reasonably playable (pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, i7 8700K, 32GB RAM), there's some odd stuff going on.
For one, the game only sees 8GB of the card's 24GB.
There's intermittent audio crackle and as reported by many other users, initial shader compilation after launching the game takes ages. Probably 30 mins on my system.

I also had to knock it down from ultra at 2560x1440 to high, as there were regular, drastic frame dips.
There's blurry textures all over the place that take ages to pop in to high res, making the game look like some of those 15-year old Unreal Engine games.

I mean, I know my CPU and motherboard are a little long in the tooth now, and probably bottle-necking the card, but I still expected a little better than this.

On the bright side, no crashes so far.

I'm guessing the shader compilation relies a lot on CPU power. On my 5800X3D it took 10 minutes and I'm pretty sure I read somebody who had a 16 core chip it took them 3 minutes to compile.

There is a launch option to allow the game to see all your vram.
 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="amd_ags_x64.dll=b"  %command%
For the audio crackle, I thought that had been fixed in the proton hotfix, I certainly haven't noticed it yet.. If you're still experiencing it you might want to look up the relevant pulse latency option.

That's probably why performance is tanking when you're trying to run on Ultra as it uses a lot of VRAM at that setting. But it might just be that the game is poorly optimized and doing strange things. I was told that the game decompresses over a gig of shaders on the fly during gameplay and this causes a lot of stutter and high cpu usage.. I hope they can fix the performance dips for lower end GPU's at least as my Vega 56 is very playable on some parts of the game at other points the frame rate dips slightly and it's very stuttery.


Last edited by lejimster on 6 April 2023 at 1:46 am UTC

Thanks lejimster, I'll check those things next time I fire it up.

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.

Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?

There's an earlier article about it, but basically, there's no requirement that a dev or publisher put it through the process although Valve might do it on their own. From the article above, the publisher/dev hadn't submitted it yet.

It's a little bit strange that a game can get the Verified tag without actually being verified xD Playable I am fine with publishers adding themselves but the green verified tag should mean something, a process that has been completed.

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.

Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?

There's an earlier article about it, but basically, there's no requirement that a dev or publisher put it through the process although Valve might do it on their own. From the article above, the publisher/dev hadn't submitted it yet.

It's a little bit strange that a game can get the Verified tag without actually being verified xD Playable I am fine with publishers adding themselves but the green verified tag should mean something, a process that has been completed.

It would be a bit strange, wouldn't it?

Thing is, this game *never* had a verified tag. It went from "Unverified" to "Unsupported". Naughty Dog promised it would work, and Valve put it on their Steam Deck slideshow on the main Steam Deck page, but never once was it labeled "Verified" in the store.

@lejimster, just to report back.
That command line option did allow the game to see all of my GPU's RAM.
While that allowed me to stick everything up to Ultra, interestingly, performance was pretty much the same (regular frame dips).
I was watching the Digital Foundry breakdown of the game last night, and it appears that despite what the menu options tell you, the whole game is heavily CPU limited even on Windows, and that there's still texture streaming going on after you've loaded the game.

Looks like they've got their work cut out for them if they want to fix the game.

PS: Switching to Proton Hotfix didn't remove the audio crackle.
I could look into latency settings, although I'm using Pipewire instead of Pulse, because that got rid of the audio crackles I was having in Guild Wars 2 and has been rock-solid for all other titles.

But to be honest, playing it alongside the RE4 remake has just reminded me what I thought of the game when I initially played it on PS3.
While it may have world-class acting and story-telling for a game, the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty average.

@lejimster, just to report back.
That command line option did allow the game to see all of my GPU's RAM.
While that allowed me to stick everything up to Ultra, interestingly, performance was pretty much the same (regular frame dips).
I was watching the Digital Foundry breakdown of the game last night, and it appears that despite what the menu options tell you, the whole game is heavily CPU limited even on Windows, and that there's still texture streaming going on after you've loaded the game.

Looks like they've got their work cut out for them if they want to fix the game.

PS: Switching to Proton Hotfix didn't remove the audio crackle.
I could look into latency settings, although I'm using Pipewire instead of Pulse, because that got rid of the audio crackles I was having in Guild Wars 2 and has been rock-solid for all other titles.

But to be honest, playing it alongside the RE4 remake has just reminded me what I thought of the game when I initially played it on PS3.
While it may have world-class acting and story-telling for a game, the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty average.

Indeed. There is a big patch for the game been released today, the texture streaming supposedly has been improved and reduced CPU usage. We will see... I'm just downloading it now.. 14GB

I don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.

It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.

In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.

Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.

Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.

Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?

There's an earlier article about it, but basically, there's no requirement that a dev or publisher put it through the process although Valve might do it on their own. From the article above, the publisher/dev hadn't submitted it yet.

It's a little bit strange that a game can get the Verified tag without actually being verified xD Playable I am fine with publishers adding themselves but the green verified tag should mean something, a process that has been completed.

It would be a bit strange, wouldn't it?

Thing is, this game *never* had a verified tag. It went from "Unverified" to "Unsupported". Naughty Dog promised it would work, and Valve put it on their Steam Deck slideshow on the main Steam Deck page, but never once was it labeled "Verified" in the store.

I misunderstood, I thought it was verified and went to unsupported. I guess then it's a good example why a verification process is needed.