To say The Last of Us Part 1 has had a rough launch on PC would be like saying Tom Brady had a good NFL career: a vast understatement. Players are reporting all sorts of issues, from broken in-game visuals, stutters and freezes, and long loading times, to the game and even their entire PC crashing multiple times in a single gaming session. The king of all these bugs, the one to rule them all, is the building shaders issue.
We explained what The Last of Us Part 1 building shaders issue is at length back on launch day, and if you have tried to play the game, you’re guaranteed to have encountered it. Building shaders is The Last of Us Part 1 trying to connect to your PC with the concept of making your subsequent experience with the game as smooth as butter. For developer Naughty Dog, this proved a mighty difficult task as building shaders took an unreasonable amount of time for the majority of players.
Naughty Dog is trying to remedy the situation quickly by releasing an urgent patch. This patch updates the game to The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5. If size is all that matters, then this update is doomed to fail. It is two lines long, and these have to be some impressive two lines if they are to appease the rampaging PC players.
Full The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch notes
- Fixed several performance and hitch-related issues impacting some users.
- Added extra crash diagnostic information to assist in investigating shader building-related crashes and other common reported stability issues.
Does The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch fix the building shaders issue?
The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch notes don’t fix the building shaders issue, not by themselves anyway. The second line of these patch notes isn’t really a fix, it’s Naughty Dog trying to gather more information on why building shaders is taking ages and why the game is as unstable as it is.
Does The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch fix the game crashing?
The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch notes don’t fix the frequent crashes either. The “performance and hitch-related issues” that are referred to in the first line of the notes have more to do with your average FPS and potential FPS drops. Our tests have shown that in this regard, The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 shows improvement of around 5-6 FPS on average and runs generally smoother, but all of that can be immediately undone by a sudden crash or a weird game-breaking glitch.
Unfortunately, The Last of Us Part 1 v1.0.1.5 patch notes don’t fail because of their size, but because they are fixing issues that feel secondary when put next to the extreme building shaders and load times waiting, and The Last of Us Part 1 crashes every 15 minutes.
Some users have suggested this dissonance between the more severe troubles of The Last of Us Part 1 and Naughty Dog’s first patch of the game is because this patch was pre-planned and not actually a result of post-launch player feedback. This is nothing but speculation but it does make some sense given the circumstances.
When will The Last of Us Part 1 get fixed?
We’d say it would take at least a couple of weeks before the most glaring The Last of Us Part 1 issues are fixed, and maybe a month or two until the game is fully optimized. These predictions are sadly not random numbers based on our faith in Naughty Dog. They come from years of experience.
These Cyberpunk 2077-esque launches are seemingly becoming more and more frequent, much to gamers’ dismay. If we must grasp at straws for a silver lining, it would be that we can more or less predict when these games that are borderline unplayable at launch will get fixed. Past experience with launches as bad as the one The Last of Us Part 1 is going through has shown that getting the game’s sh…aders together isn’t likely to happen in a couple of days.
