The Last of Us Part 2 has finally made its way onto desktop and handheld PCs, and so far, the game seems to run quite well on both systems, especially for the Steam Deck. It’s not only Steam Deck Verified but also holds a very positive rating on Steam, suggesting that Nixxes and Naughty Dog have indeed taken Steam Deck support “very, very seriously,” and thankfully, we didn't get to see a rating downgrade like we saw with Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

That said, the developers have rolled out another major patch, version 1.2, which brings several essential fixes along with performance improvements for Steam Deck users, meaning that it should be a bit more stable in certain circumstances now.

Frame Generation should be smoother now

According to the version 1.2 patch notes, AMD’s FidelityFX was updated to version 1.1.3, and along with that, they resolved excessive jittering that could happen on the Steam Deck when FSR Frame Generation was enabled. This means that playing the game with Frame Generation should be much smoother now. That said, it's still a tough feature to justify using since it works best when you’re already hitting a stable 60 FPS, and on the Steam Deck, even the devs have mainly targeted a 30 FPS experience.

Apart from that, the update also addresses a bunch of different bugs and fixes, like completing a No Return Challenge will now correctly reward the player with the associated weapon skin, resolved a bug that could cause Direct3D Invalid Call crashes, shadow pop-in issues on the side of buildings, the game won’t crash when loading into a cutscene with a wide Field of View setting turned on, and many more along with various stability improvements.

Here are the full changes:

Release Notes – 1.2.10416.0553

• Addressed a bug where players were unable to fire weapons on the first mouse click, after using the mouse to restart a checkpoint.
• Fixed an issue where players would automatically fire their weapon, when aiming after a stealth kill, if the Reload/Quick Throw/Use action was mapped to [R].
• Enabling NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation in the launcher now increases the frame rate by the same amount as enabling it in the in-game Display menu.
• Addressed an issue where completing a No Return Challenge would not reward the player with the associated weapon skin.
• Refracted light in the aquarium is no longer affected by high frame rates, preventing it from being distracting and overly flashy.
• Resolved shadow pop-in issues on the side of a building and flickering in a blood stain on the floor of a building in the Capitol Hill area.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when loading into a cutscene with a wide Field of View setting.
• Resolved a bug that could cause Direct3D Invalid Call crashes.
• Fixed a bug that caused some username text on No Return leaderboards to appear as question marks.
• Resolved an issue that could cause dark lines to appear in volumetric fog during camera movement on ultrawide aspect ratios.
• Updated AMD FidelityFx to version 1.1.3 and resolved excessive jitter on Steam Deck when FSR Frame Generation is enabled.
• Addressed a bug where pressing ‘Reset to Default’ in the Graphics menu would cause the preset to incorrectly appear as ‘Custom’.
• Various fixes for visual bugs in ultrawide cinematics.
• Various stability improvements.
• Various localization fixes.
• Various UI bug fixes.

Source: Steam

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.