Skip to main content

No, The Last of Us PC requirements aren’t changing

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) released an updated PC requirement chart for The Last of Us Part One on Monday, clarifying the system requirements players will need if they want to play the game when it launches on March 28. Some reports claim that the PC requirements have been downgraded, but they haven’t; if anything, the port calls for a slightly more powerful system.

The original PC requirements (below) called for a Radeon RX 5800 XT at the Recommended tier, which is to run the game at 1080p with 60 frames per second (fps). The updated requirements call for an RX 5700 XT instead. That sounds like a downgrade, but AMD never released an RX 5800 XT — it was a typo. You don’t need to look further than the next GPU recommendation to see that, which is an AMD “Radeom” RX 6600 XT. The updated requirements have fixed that typo, as well.

System requirements for The Last of Us Part One on PC.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

There are some changes in the new PC spec sheet, though. Most notably, the game’s Ultra recommendation calls for an AMD RX 7900 XTX instead of the RX 7900 XT it previously called for. It’s an interesting change, especially now that AMD is offering The Last of Us Part One for free along with the purchase of a new AMD graphics card.

Another update is the Iron Galaxy logo. Previously, it wasn’t clear who was handling the PC port of The Last of Us, but the updated spec sheet clarifies that Iron Galaxy is the studio behind it. That’s the studio that ported Uncharted Legacy of Thieves collection to PC, which was one of the more stable PC releases we’ve seen in the past couple of years.

Updated PC requirements for the Last of Us Part One.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Everything else is identical in the spec sheet; the update mainly is there to fix some typos and give a nod to AMD’s flagship graphics card. Even without major changes, the good news is that you don’t need a beefy rig to run The Last of Us Part One. At a minimum, you can get by with an Intel Core i7-47700K and Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics card.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

The more interesting requirement is RAM. The game calls for 16GB at minimum, with the Ultra and Performance tiers jumping up to 32GB. This is a similar path that Returnal and Hogwarts Legacy went down, neither of which really needed 32GB of RAM. That could be the case here, where the developers are asking for more than what’s needed.

Editors' Recommendations

Jacob Roach
Senior Staff Writer, Computing
Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…
Don’t believe the hype — the era of native resolution gaming isn’t over
Alan Wake looking at a projection of himself.

Native resolution is dead, or so the story goes. A string of PC games released this year, with the most recent being Alan Wake 2, have come under fire for basically requiring some form of upscaling to achieve decent performance. Understandably, there's been some backlash from PC gamers, who feel as if the idea of running a game at native resolution is quickly becoming a bygone era.

There's some truth to that, but the idea that games will rely on half-baked upscalers to achieve reasonable performance instead of "optimization" is misguided at best -- and downright inaccurate at worst. Tools like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) will continue to be a cornerstone of PC gaming, but here's why they can't replace native resolution entirely.
The outcry
Let's start with why PC gamers have the impression that native resolution is dead. The most recent outcry came over Alan Wake 2 when the system requirements revealed that the game was built around having either DLSS or FSR turned on. That's not a new scenario, either. The developers of Remnant 2 confirmed the game was designed around upscaling, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a AAA release in the last few years that didn't pack in upscaling tech.

Read more
23% of PC gamers probably can’t play Alan Wake 2. Here’s why
Alan looks surprised in Alan Wake 2.

We've known for months that Alan Wake 2 will be one of the most demanding games on PC, but new details show just how taxing the upcoming title from developer Remedy will actually be. According to a now-deleted tweet from a Remedy employee, somewhere around 23% of PC players won't be able to play the game.

To be clear, the employee didn't say that number explicitly. In response to the outcry over the Alan Wake 2 system requirements, the employee shared that only cards with mesh shaders are officially supported, meaning any Nvidia 10-series or AMD RX 5000-series GPUs or older aren't officially supported.

Read more
I can’t get excited about AMD’s next version of FSR anymore
Hero art for Forspoken

AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 is available after nearly a year of waiting. The company announced the feature around November of last year, in a swift response to Nvidia's, at the time, new Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS 3). AMD's pitch was simple. The company was going to deliver the same performance-multiplying feature that generates frames instead of rendering them, and it would work with any graphics card.

Now it's here, and on paper, FSR 3 does exactly what AMD claimed. It's clear AMD has a lot more work to do to make FSR 3 work properly, though. And after almost a year of waiting for the feature to arrive, it's hard betting on promises for what FSR 3 could be in the future.
Where are the games?

Read more