Downloaded TLOU:RM just to see how it could perform on my system (i5-12400, 16GB, 3060) and uh...yikes. I don't know man, but from my experience with game patches, getting this into an acceptable state on hardware like mine, which I don't think is that out of the ordinary for a lot of gamers, is going to require some level of
unparalleled performance improvements - these would need to be some of the most transformative game patches ever released. It's one thing to add shader compiling, fixing crashes and maybe reduce a little stuttering though updates, but I really doubt we're going to see anything substantially improve loading/rendering performance. Hope I'm just pessimistic.
I can definitely see with a beefier CPU and an Ada-level card how spectacular the game could look and run, and hell especially if they add DLSS3, no doubt for a certain class of hardware this would be a hell of an experience - but there's a massive gulf between that and the settings I can run at.
Soooo....
- Both GPU and CPU bottlenecked on my system at 1440p using DLSS/FSR Performance, preset High - but even at Medium there were a few edge cases where I still was still limited by my GPU. While I haven't gotten that far (and don't plan to as this is just to check out the status of it technically), the CPU/GPU load can vary quite a bit depending upon the scene, so I really wouldn't take a benchmark that focuses just on the opening area in the quarantined zone as truly indicative of the performance for the game as a whole. I've had frame rates in the 50's with 70% GPU load but 99% CPU (shaders all precompiled), and 70% CPU but 99% GPU. Didn't test it extensively but based on my results with DLSS, odds are you will not be able to maintain 1080p native 60 without reconstruction on a 3060.
- Several instances of "LOADING" as the action comes to a halt in the middle of a level and you're waiting 10+ seconds.
- Even when not limited by CPU/GPU, occasional small stutters.
- Prolonged stutters due to massive CPU spikes when traversing, presumably to decompressing textures...?
- Somewhat rare, but noticeable shadow banding at points which I don't think exist in the PS5 version.
Yeah not good, but not too surprising based on other reports. I remember when this was first announced and I thought "Hmm I'll definitely hold out for the PC version, I may be able to run console settings at 4K with DLSS performance for 60fps" - lol.
That being said, the PS5 version's TAA is quite blurry, so even with requiring DLSS at 1440p, there was a chance in terms of overall visual quality it would still hold up, if not be superior. At first glance when I started with 1440p DLSS Quality, that looked to the case, it was definitely sharper and while there was the odd moiré pattern when the DLSS resolve was struggling with the odd floor grating, but overall in the daylight areas it was very solid. As I eventually had to reduce the DLSS load from balanced to performance to try to maintain 60fps when we're getting outside the city in the dark with rain, that naturally reduced the quality, but still relatively OK.
However what I really wanted to test was my old nemesis with reconstruction, and that is when it has to deal with lower-res post-process effects. Some handle it decently, but quite a few don't. I was especially curious as when I used DLSS it's almost exclusively at 4k and can still notice these artifacts when they occur, so was really interested to see how it dealt with these cases starting from 1440p, and with a game that relies heavily on post process effects to boot.
And...
welp (and note that's using DLSS
balanced, which I couldn't maintain). Unfortunately using the flashlight is not exactly a rare practice in this game, and there were more egregious incidents of it in combination with certain materials behaving oddly outside of what I captured in that video, such as bathroom tile (where FSR in particular struggled to an almost comical level). Note that is on High, and you have control over the resolution of many of these effects, but even at Ultra these artifacts were still pretty prominent. The thing is to keep my FPS even close to 60 at 1440p/performance I could drop to medium, but then that would just make these reconstruction artifacts
even worse.
So yeah, measured 'on the whole' vs every scene up until that point, I guess you could say DLSS at resolutions like 1440p in this game is 'good' to 'ok', but when you run into these incidents which can occur quite frequently in some environments, it really takes you out it. There's the possibility these can be improved with patches too, albeit Uncharted had similar artifacts that to the best of my knowledge that were never patched either.
For my money you would need DLSS Quality, High preset
min to just compare to the PS5's performance mode (which while 'soft' is at least extremely stable) - at least when you take into account actually running the game beyond taking a few comparative still screenshots in the daytime. That level of performance means we're in 3070, maybe even 3080 territory - not to mention requiring a 12700k likely to deal with CPU bottleneck. That's nuts.
