The Last of Us Part 1 is still in a rocky state, since its launch on March 28, it is still carrying a mixed rating overall with over 17,800 reviews.
Today, Patch 1.04 was released with a few notable updates that should improve performance overall, and therefore on Steam Deck:
Optimized CPU and GPU use throughout the game
Improved texture fidelity and resolution on in-game Low and Medium settings
Improved graphical fidelity on the in-game Low graphics preset, particularly water surfaces no longer appears black
Fixed a crash that may occur on AMD CPUs with affinity limited to X3D cores
Fixed an issue where textures may render incorrectly on AMD GPUs
Fixed an issue on Steam Deck where resetting Display settings to Default no longer enabled AMD FSR 2 (Options > Display)
There are other fixes as well, but we want to focus on those above, you can see the full patch notes here
You can see our video testing the latest update below
Overall, we have seen a marked improvement in the quality and performance on Steam Deck with this update, with you being able to run the game at a mostly stable 30 FPS, with tweaked low settings and FSR 2.0 Quality mode.
It's not perfect though, it still dips into the low 20s when loading some new areas, until you either respawn in that area or you stick around there for 30s.
Before, on Patch 1.02, the only option was low settings and balanced or performance FSR 2.0. Now you can get a perfectly stable 30 FPS with FSR 2.0 balanced or enjoy slightly better graphics with FSR 2.0 quality but still deal with some minor dips now and then.
