The Last of Us closer to playable on Steam Deck, but the Deck still has RAM problems

The Last of Us Part I from Naughty Dog has another big performance patch out, and the result on Steam Deck is quite surprising. But the Steam Deck still suffers from a major problem.

In terms of performance, on low details with FSR2 set to Quality, you're far more likely now to be able to hit 30FPS in lots of sections of the game on Steam Deck. Plenty of dips here and there though, but it's certainly a drastic improvement over how it was at launch. The v1.0.5.0 patch includes many assorted optimizations, and the game even looks better now on the Low and Medium graphics presets as they've fixed up a bunch of texture and lighting problems.

The biggest annoyance though, is one I and others have seen a few times now, where the Steam Deck shows in the performance overlay hitting about 14GB RAM and then the game suddenly stutters and crawls down in FPS and eventually just stops. After a while, it then reboots the Steam Deck (bug reported). A problem also seen in God of War, Sons of the Forest, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Horizon Zero Dawn and no doubt plenty of other bigger games I've yet to play. An issue Valve has yet to solve or formally comment on but the CryoUtilities scripts can help with in some cases.

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You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam.

Full patch notes:

• Reduced shader building times
• Optimized code to improve global CPU performance
• Optimized content to improve performance across several levels
• Improved level loading to help reduce the amount of 'Please Wait' and loading screens
• Added a new Effects Density setting, which adjusts the density and number of non-critical visual effects (Options > Graphics)
• Increased crowd sizes on Low and Medium Ambient Character Density settings and added a Very Low option (Options > Graphics)
• Implemented additional scalability tuning for Low and Medium in-game Graphics settings
• Reduced the VRAM impact of texture quality settings, allowing most players to increase their texture quality settings or experience improved performance with their current settings
• Fixed a crash that would occur on boot on Windows 11
• Fixed a crash that could occur on Intel Arc
• Fixed a crash that may occur when starting a New Game in Left Behind prior to the completion of shader building
• Corrected an issue where pointing the camera at the floor while aiming would cause the player and camera to visually stutter
• Fixed an issue where Sniping Sensitivity settings were not applying to all scoped weapons. Additionally, Sniping Sensitivity has been renamed to Scoped Sensitivity (Options > Controls > Mouse Camera Sensitivity)
• Fixed an issue where players could not click on 'Jump To Unbound' when prompted in the custom controls settings (Options > Controls > Input > Customize Controls)
• Fixed an issue where changing Graphics settings (Options > Graphics > Graphics Preset) during gameplay wouldn't restart the player at the correct checkpoint
• Fixed an issue where adjustments to Lens Flare (Options > Graphics > Visual Effects Settings > Lens Flare) were not not applied
• [Pittsburgh] Fixed an issue where players may consistently fall out-of-world when restarting at the checkpoint in the bookstore
• [Left Behind] Fixed an issue where players may get soft locked when jumping into the electrified water

AMD-Specific

• Implemented improvements to load times.
• Fixed an issue where shaders may take an abnormally long time to load.