Performance guide for 60 fps with Ryzen 3600 and RTX 2060 Super

This guide was made for a very early release version. The game has been updated many times since then. Consider this guide OUTDATED!

EDIT 2: Please do note that when I overclock my Ryzen 3600 from 3.9 Ghz to 4.15 Ghz the power consumption and the temperatures go DOWN! Yes, it seems like magic but it must be that the game tries to utilize other cores when you don't have a certain clock speed on certain cores. So when you overclock it, the other cores get not utilized as much which then results in lower temps and lower power consumption. I also get 3 to 5 more frames when overclocking and it is easier to maintain a steady 60 fps.
This is of course an educated guess from a layman but it sure does work: here's the proof:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=can-49LkrWI


EDIT: Video proof is now up! As I am saying below, game struggles with lightning and reflections. So a rainy night mission will cause your fps to drop to 50 or even 45. As shown in the video. Then again, a quick and messy combat situation won't cause a single drop of frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDgCS-7UJ0


Played for 2 hours now, and all in all, the game is fantastic. I have never experienced such gruesome hand-to-hand combat. The animations are fantastic. The story very, very intriguing so far. And the level design is among the best.
All the more deplorable that the port got released in such a bad state. The game is literally murdering my CPU. Then again, it is only a 15 hour game, so I guess my CPU can handle 15 hours of stress test over the next few days.

Here is a quick and dirty performance guide. I mostly achieve 60 fps with these settings. Rainy night scenes will drop the fps to 50 though. Stutters happen but not that often. And they are not huge. For a second or two the fps goes down to 40, then goes up again. Especially when transitioning to a new area. The cutscenes are surprisingly smooth though!


My system:
Ryzen 3600
RTX 2060 Super
2x 8GB @3200 mhz
Game on NVMe SSD


1 Install your latest GPU drivers.

2 optional Before you start your game, copy a proper “oo2core_9_win64.dll” file into the game directory of The Last of Us. I took mine from Warframe. Google this fix when you need further info about it. I cannot confirm if this actually helps since I never tried playing the game without it.

3 Now start your game and WAIT for the shaders to load. Despite the reports here, this only took me about 30 minutes.
Maybe this is because of step [2], maybe this is because the hotfix that got pushed out earlier today (Wednesday).

4 While your shaders load, you can already adjust your graphical settings.

DISPLAY
EDIT: Resolution --- 1920 x 1080
V-Sync --- OFF
Framerate Cap --- 60 [important to get a stable experience and protect your hardware]
Scaling Mode --- DLSS Quality or FSR
Field of View --- leave it at 0
Motion Blur --- 0
Chrom. Aberrat. Int. --- 0
Film Grain Int. --- 0
Gore --- Default

GRAPHICS

Animation Quality --- Medium
Draw Distance --- Medium
Dynamic Obj. LOD --- Medium
Characters LOD --- High
Environments LOD --- Medium

Dynamic Obj. Textures --- High
Characters Texture Quality --- Medium
Environ. Texture Quality --- High
Vis. Effects Texture Quality --- Medium
Texture Filtering --- 8x
Texture Sampling Quality --- High

Ambient Shadows Quality --- Full Resolution
Directional Shad. Res. --- Medium
Directional Shad. Distance --- High ***
Image Based Lighting --- On ***
Spotlights Shadow Res. --- Medium
Point Lights Shadow Resol. --- High
Bounced Lighting --- On ***
Screen Space Shad. Qual. --- Medium
Dynamic Screen Space Shad.--- On
Contact Shadow Quality --- Medium
Screen Space Ambi. Occl. --- On
Amb. Occl. Denoise Qual. --- Low
Screen Space Direct. Occl. --- On
Screen Space Cone Tracing --- On

Screen Space Reflections --- On
SSR Accuracy --- 50
SSR Distance --- 50
Glossy Reflections Qual. --- 25
Real-Time Reflections Qual. --- Medium
Real-Time Clouds Shad. --- On

Screen Space Sub-Surface Scattering --- OFF
Refraction Quality --- Full Resolution

DoF --- OFF
Motion Blur --- OFF

Volumetric Effects Quality --- Medium ***
Lens Flare --- Half Resolution


These settings are optimized for smooth gameplay AND keeping the game immersive! The game seems to struggle a lot with lightning and reflections. So if you don’t get the desired framerate, settings marked with *** will give you further boost. Especially the Volumetric Effects. But it will degrade the immersion.

[Sunbather]

@Prostagma: because the game's CPU utilization was unreasonably high, basically forcing all 12 clocks of my CPU to run at 90% utilization.
That isn't necessarily dangerous but high utilization means high power draw means a lot of heat which at the end of the day shortens the life span of your CPU.
With all that being said, the consensus nowadays seems to be that the high CPU utilization has been fixed.

[Brutapaja]

why the framerate cap is important to protect my pc?

[Sunbather]

@EJstheworst Please do note that I haven't played in a long while and actually refunded the game when one update made the performance and CPU utilization even worse! However, word is that the game runs better now.
2nd note: The RTX 2060 is a good bit slowe than the 2060 Super!
No matter what you do: use DLSS!

[EJsEyeD]

Gonna try this out. These are my specs currently:
Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core Processor
32.0 GB DDR4 RAM
RTX 2060 6GB
GTX 1050ti 4GB
1TB HDD Main files
2TB SSD Games + Game related things ONLY
500GB SSD Windows + Driver files

[Sunbather]

@shabbyyy13:
Well, not really because of your "slow processing unit" (i.e. clock speed) but because of the lack of threads. Which is why my Ryzen 3600 which is objectively a worse CPU than your i7 9700k is performing better in this particular game since it has 12 threads and you only have 8.
That being said, you should get better performance than me in every other single game.
Just make sure, your next CPU has high clock speed AND at least 16 threads (almost all new Intel and AMD CPUs from 350 bucks upwards) and you will be future proof.

[shabbyyy13]

Cool got it, at 1080p my GPU is unable to work at full capacity cause of the slow processing unit even though its working at 100%.

[Sunbather]

@shabbyyy13:

Actually, this just proves that your CPU is the bottleneck. 4k stresses your GPU much more, obviously, so the GPU reaches its limit much sooner than your CPU. Whereas on 1080p your GPU is underutilized because your CPU holds it back.
Think of it: When you get roughly around the same fps when playing on 4k and on 1080p but in the first case your GPU is used a 100% and the in the second case only 60% this clearly shows that something is holding back your GPU, doesn't it?

There is a reason why they test CPUs on 1080p.

[shabbyyy13]

Hey, I tried this game @4k High Preset, the gpu usage is 100% and cpu 61%. The fps I get varies from 36-40. I think the cpu fine.

[shabbyyy13]

I have installed it on SSD with latest driver.
I guess i'll have to upgrade the cpu, this game is so demanding.
Thank you :)

[Sunbather]

@shabbyyy13:

[2]

I am terribly sorry but I fear there is nothing else you can do about it except a) upgrading your CPU or b) waiting for a patch that makes the game distribute CPU usage differently but let's be real here, that won't happen :(

Tip: IF you do upgrade your CPU, buy AMD. They are better now than Intel. And after a few years you can just buy a new CPU and put it into your old mainboard. Meanwhile, Intel wants you to buy a new motherboard for every new CPU generation, and more often than not the motherboards are more expensive than the CPU itself!