Nathan Drake is the latest PlayStation star to join Sony’s catalog transition to PC. The Legacy of Thieves collection, an expanded version of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and its expansion The Lost Legacy, which launched on PS5 last year, arrives on PC this week.
With so much of Sony’s internal transplant studio Nixxes involved, the honor here fell to Iron Galaxy, who made a name for themselves as an accomplished transplant studio. The task was to take the roots of the old Naughty Dog engine used in the PS5 remaster and port them to PC running with DirectX12 API. This is quite a challenge given that the diverse nature of the PC platform is diametrically opposed to the bespoke nature of an engine designed directly for the PlayStation hardware.
lost ark shader
One of the big hurdles for developers in the PC space using DirectX12 is shaders, or more specifically shader compilation. These chunky GPU code routines are required for each platform, consoles and even fixed hardware like Steam Decks. However, on PC, depending on the GPU generation, make and model, you may need to compile all or some bespoke shaders. These could be as simple as drawing his UI on his 3D object when you click a stick or rendering it in an explosion using GPU particles.
So the team took an asynchronous approach, much like we’ve seen with Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man. Basically, as soon as you load into the game, he creates these across one or more CPU threads while playing. The goal here is to create all the necessary GPU shaders for all possible areas of the game, store them in a local cache on your hard drive, and call them as needed. Because of this cost, you need a fast CPU to be able to play the game without much hitching at build time, as you can easily see in the game menu. Once these shaders are created, you should have a mostly smooth experience unless you update your GPU drivers. We did notice a few stutters at times, but kudos to the team for how they’ve done this so that you can jump right into the game while still getting the most out of your hardware.
unearth treasure
Both games in the collection are based on last year’s PS5 remasters, meaning unlocked framerates, 4K resolution, faster input times, and multiple modes on the console. On PC, this means a choice of graphics options, resolutions beyond 4K, ultra-wide aspect ratios, and access to AMD’s FSR 2.0 or Nvidia DLSS, along with his TAA solution unique to the game.
Advantages over the PS5 version include a slight boost in shadows that addresses one of the PS4 and PS5 version’s weaknesses, offering higher resolution maps with softer feathered edges. This is certainly not a huge improvement, but it can clean up shadow aliasing in certain scenes, and may have a moderate performance impact depending on your hardware. It also offers better levels of foliage and geometry detail than the PS4 and PS4 Pro, and can be closer to the PS5 upgrade, which seems to be a bug, but not always.
You can notice a slight boost to bushes, shrubs, and other distant foliage in many sections. It’s exactly the same as the PS5, meaning some rocks and trees boast higher polygon counts, as well as small bumps in mid-to-far geometry. The problem is that this doesn’t always exist. Some sections on PC show lower LoD levels for a short time than on PS5. I assume this is also a bug as the other scenes match directly.
The overall Ultra settings match the PS5 exactly, except for the shadows which match High. In other words, Ultra can see a 2-5% performance impact over High, depending on shadow map requirements per scene. In addition, another omission (or most likely another bug) on PC is that per-object camera blur is not enabled and there is no motion blur effect on PC, impacting performance by a few % is to give Hopefully the team will release a patch soon to make this work as this is more easily recognized in action than in LoD.
Here are the main differences in graphics settings on PC and how they compare to the PS5 version:
- The texture filtering line is almost exactly High.
- Ambient Occlusion is closest to Ultra and the High setting isn’t too different.
- Reflection is also practically the same for High and Ultra, with a performance cost of around 1%, while the PS5 is listed as High. 8%. It should be noted that the game allows SSR to be turned on or off per surface/material. Many puddles only use cubemap reflections even in Ultra.
- Unsurprisingly, the textures match the PlayStation 5 Ultra. These are the same as High, but allocate higher mipmaps in VRAM, so higher quality is used further away. Note that on 8GB cards such as my RTX 2070, resolutions above 1440p will exceed the limit.
Final settings for PS5:
- Texture – Ultra
- Model Quality – Enhanced or better
- shadow – high
- Ambient Occlusion – High (Ultra)
- Reflection – High
- Anisotropic Filtering – High
- Note: The difference in the current PC build means that the Level of Detail is lower than the PC maximum and Per Object Motion Blur is currently not working.
run at work
When it comes to performance, if your hardware is powerful enough, your PC will be free from the PS5’s 120 fps max. In my tests, I set everything to high. This could give you a 2-13% performance boost on PC, with the caveat that the difference between MB and LoD on the PS5 rounds out Shadow Boost. The PS5 has 3 modes, all tracking at a fixed resolution. Fidelity offers native 4K, Performance offers 1440p, and Performance+ is fixed at 1080p. Both Fidelity and Performance can be unlocked up to 60 or 120 fps when using a VRR screen. Compare these modes with PC.
Starting with native 4K Fidelity mode, PC lags PS5 by about 37% in RT cinematics. These will vary from section to section. So the PS5 could be 9 to 15 fps higher framerate than the RTX 2070 on my PC. With low CPU demands and high GPU demands, we are far from CPU bound here. So 100 at these high settings at 4K. % GPU bound on both. Covering expansive drives and action-packed Raiders Homage action sequences, the RTX 2070 delivers an average fps of 35.2 versus the PS5’s 47.5, giving it an average 34% advantage in favor of the PS5. With the AMD RX 6800 in Ultra settings, you can get close to 60 fps locked in 4K. It can drop below the 50s at some point, but with FreeSync enabled it’s all but invisible without this kind of frame rate test. That’s about a 24% improvement over the PS5 at 4K Ultra settings.
1440p mode doesn’t change any settings, but it reduces resolution by 55% compared to 4K fidelity mode. In other words, it’s closer to being CPU bound rather than GPU bound.PC APIs and driver costs are significantly higher than PS4 and PS5, and this can be seen in the CPU demand. Even with a Zen 3 5600x with 6 cores/12 threads at 4.6GHz, even the RX 6800’s 1440p can be CPU limited. This is not always the case. cause of them. This is also seen in his 120fps 1080p mode on PS5, with certain areas dipping into his 90s while moving. This suggests that the engine still relies on his CPU for some of the data streaming work. This means that the much more powerful CPU is bottlenecked at the same point.
PS5’s Lost Legacy In Fidelity mode can hit 60fps on rare occasions, but this game is more demanding than Uncharted 4 in points, and seeing this mode dip into the high 30s for brief heavy moments So the RX 6800 is about 25% faster than the PS5 in similar sections, and the PS5 is about 30% faster than the RTX 2070. GPU limit. Note though that DLSS quality mode runs at his 1440p, which is more GPU intensive than running at 1440p. Slightly better fidelity, but may introduce ghosting artifacts in particle effects. Therefore, a balanced setting is recommended when running on this level of GPU. This reduces resolution and image quality, but it’s worth the impact for performance gains, so we can close the 30% gap.
Most of the time we recommend setting the game to high in all areas and using DLSS or FSR to get the best balance of 60 or 120 fps if your CPU and GPU can achieve it. increase. Aside from shadows, the subtle visual effects done in Ultra are virtually invisible. This includes the extra foliage and geometry that the PS5 version sports. requires a large cut.
Overview
Uncharted games are diamonds on the PlayStation platform, and nothing can dull that shine on PC. Despite lacking the level of tweaks we’re used to on PC, the port has been accomplished here, offering enough choice to personalize the game to your needs. Framerate, resolution and shadow enhancements all depend on how important they are, but the choice is good. You can take advantage of it. But they’re largely the same as last year’s PS5 version, and in most respects don’t significantly surpass the PS4 Pro versions from 6 and 5 years ago. Without a very high level CPU and GPU, it wasn’t always possible to lock 120 fps even at 1080, at least on current builds. That said, with the necessary hardware, you can run your game at 160+ fps and even 8K. A few minor bugs remain, but hopefully Iron Galaxy will soon have a patch that addresses the ones I pointed out here and those I reported to the team during my review. I hope
