tlou-remastered-pc

The Last of Us Remastered — PC port

Runs the PS4 The Last of Us Remastered (CUSA00552, with its update 1.11) natively on Windows. The game's own x86-64 code runs directly on the PC; a runtime supplies the PS4 system libraries, and a Vulkan renderer (the shadPS4 video core) executes the PS4 GPU work.

No game files are in this repository. You need your own copy of the game (the dumped CUSA00552 folder, and its update). This project is not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment or Naughty Dog.

Status

Work in progress, reported playable from start to finish by a player, with one crash along the way that is not fixed yet, and with rough edges.

• Frame rate: on a laptop with a Core i7-8750H and a GTX 1050 Ti Mobile (4 GB), 60 FPS in light areas and about 40-44 FPS in the heaviest area tested, where the CPU side of the renderer is the limit (the draw recording thread at about 87%): lowering the resolution barely helps there.
• Frame pacing: frame times swing while the game runs below its limit, and a fixed 30 FPS limit (launcher, or the in-game menu) makes motion clearly more even.
• Known issues:
  • NPCs sometimes move in jumps. It comes and goes between runs of the same build; the cause is not settled. The bursts of long frames that seemed to go with it shrank with the faster guest condition variables, and a fixed 30 FPS limit had no jumps in the sessions tried.
  • A frame that compiles many new shaders can pause the game for a moment, mostly the first time an area is played. The game's own frame watchdog is patched from 2 s to 20 s for that (TLOU_FIXES=none leaves the game unpatched). If a load ever hangs, start with GOW3_FRAMES_IN_FLIGHT=0 (slower).
  • Shots pass through some parts of objects with no effect, though they hit walls and most objects where the crosshair is. One firefly pendant, hanging from a tree in the courtyard after the quarantine zone, cannot be shot down for that reason. Ruled out so far: the renderer's CPU/GPU data exchange, the port's patches and red-zone protection, and the CPU's approximate math instructions.
• Not available for this game yet: a true mouse camera (the mouse drives the right stick instead, though no longer capped at the stick's top speed), the draw distance sliders and keyboard button prompts, which need the game's own camera code, settings block and prompt textures to be located.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit).
• A CPU from Intel's 4th-generation Core (Haswell) or newer, or any AMD Ryzen: the game needs AVX, F16C, BMI1, MOVBE and LZCNT.
• A graphics card or integrated GPU with Vulkan 1.3 and a current driver.
• About 6 GB of free RAM for the game.

Playing

From a release: extract the zip, open TLOU Launcher.exe, choose the game folder under Folders and press Play. Nothing else needs installing. After that, a shortcut with the game's icon appears beside the launcher.

From this repository (needs Python 3.10 or newer):

1. Put the game folder CUSA00552 next to this repository's folder, and the update next to it as CUSA00552-patch (or name another update folder with TLOU_UPDATE=<folder>). An update you only have as a PKG unpacks there with python tools/install_update.py <update.pkg> <game folder>.
2. Build the runtime (below), then start the game with launcher/TLOU Launcher.exe, Start-TLOU.cmd, or python tools/probe_tlou.py --boot --seconds 0 [--game <game folder>].
3. Saves and settings stay in analysis/tlou-user; the log is analysis/tlou/boot.log. Each session also records your controller input (analysis/tlou/pad-record-*.txt, the newest 5), so a crash can be replayed on the same route; TLOU_RECORD_PAD=0 turns that off.
4. With this repository on a hard disk, put the shader cache (analysis/tlou-user/cache, about 250 MB in some 12,000 files) on an SSD: the game reads all of it in its first seconds, and from a hard disk that takes long enough for the game to build pipelines itself, pausing for seconds. With the game closed, move the folder, then link it back: mklink /J analysis\tlou-user\cache <folder on the SSD> (in cmd).

The launcher sets the display, frame limit and folders, in nine languages; its Debug menu switches each optimization off, some of them while the game runs. The in-game menu (Insert, or R3+L2 on a controller) holds the graphics, controls and frame rate settings.

Without a DualShock 4: the touchpad (backpack, crafting) is Tab / Backspace on the keyboard or Back/View on an Xbox-style controller. Shaking the controller is G on the keyboard or the Share/Capture button (GOW3_KEY_MAP / GOW3_PAD_MAP shake=... rebind it). The flashlight never flickers out by default, so it needs no shake: Celogamez's GoldHEN cheat "Flashlight Does Not Turn Off" (TLOU_CHEATS=none turns it off).

Building

From an MSYS2 CLANG64 shell:

pacman -S --needed git patch \
  mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-{toolchain,cmake,ninja,pkgconf,python} \
  mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-{vulkan-headers,vulkan-loader,vulkan-memory-allocator,glslang} \
  mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-{sdl3,fmt,boost,robin-map,xxhash,ffmpeg,zydis} \
  mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-{spirv-tools,spirv-headers,spirv-cross}
git submodule update --init --recursive
gow3_pc/build.sh                 # the runtime: gow3_pc/out/gow3-probe.exe

Clone with core.autocrlf=false: line-ending conversion breaks the FSR-Vulkan patches.

gow3_pc/build.sh also builds launcher/TLOU Launcher.exe. With a profile in gow3_pc/pgo/tlou.profdata it builds with PGO and LTO (about 10% more FPS in the heaviest area tested); the profile is not in the repository, and without it the build is plain. GOW3_PGO=off gives quicker development builds. A new profile needs a clean build.

tools/package_windows.sh builds dist/TLOU-Remastered-windows.zip, the release: the runtime and its DLLs, the launcher, the scripts and a Python of its own. tools/package_check.py refuses game files and paths of the build machine.

The launcher reads its background and icon from the player's own copy of the game. A local icon goes in launcher/assets/icon.ico (not in the repository).

Repository layout

Path	Contents
gow3_pc/	The runtime: C runtime (src/), GPU library (gpu/: shadPS4 video core and shims), preparation scripts (scripts/). Diagnostics settings: gow3_pc/README.md.
launcher/	The launcher (tlou_launcher.pyw, Tkinter) and its starter (tlou-launcher.c).
tools/package_windows.sh	The Windows release zip.
tools/probe_tlou.py	Prepares the game's executable (with its update) and starts the runtime with this game's settings.
tools/tlou_pad.py, tools/tlou_bench.py	Scripted controller input, frame captures and analysis; a repeatable frame rate measurement on a test profile.
tools/decode_dump.py, other tools/	Image dump decoding and other diagnostics.
tools/install_update.py	Unpacks an update PKG next to the game folder (PkgTool, tools/pkgtool).

Credits and license

• The runtime comes from BilalReloaded's PS4 port runtime (GitHub), which started from FelipePrado0's SpartanPort (gow3_pc; whose internal names, such as GOW3_* settings, it keeps), and the shadPS4 video core.
• The camera motion for temporal anti-aliasing (CameraMotion::OnVelocityConstants and the motion vector mode) comes from SuperMedo's PS4 port (GitHub, GPL v2).
• Windows red-zone protection and the reader-preferring memory table lock come from HayatoG's tlou_pc (GPL-2.0-or-later); the protection follows shadPS4's design.
• The 1 ms timer, the power throttling opt-out, the faster guest condition variables, the idle job worker patch's method and the package's Python copy come from BilalReloaded's Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection port.
• NVIDIA DLSS: DLAA uses NVIDIA DLSS technology through the DLSS bridge adapted from IFreemz/shadPS4-Bloodborne-DLSS-FSR (MIT). NVIDIA, RTX and DLSS are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
• AMD FSR 4: the v07 INT8 model as built by Q2RTX from AMD's MIT-licensed FidelityFX SDK source.
• Third-party code: FSR (AMD), imgui, magic_enum, miniz, xbyak, LibAtrac9, FFmpeg, SDL3, PkgTool (LibOrbisPkg, LGPL-3.0).
• Licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later (see LICENSE).