Naughty Dog’s Uncharted has finally arrived on PC in the form of The Legacy Collection, bringing together Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy in a double-pack, initially enhanced for PlayStation 5 earlier in the year and now finally available for PC. As is the custom, Digital Foundry will be telling you what the settings actually do, which ones to choose for the most optimal experience and also stacking up Iron Galaxy’s port against the reference PlayStation 5 version. There’s a lot to like in this conversion and the quality of Naughty Dog’s work remains intact, but equally, there’s a sense that PC should be delivering more.
First impressions for a PC port are often defined for me by looking at its options, where we find something of a mixed bag. There are things I like such as support for FSR 2 and DLSS, with separate sharpening sliders for both. However, there are other things that I found disappointing or counterintuitive for the PC audience. For example, resolution and refresh rate are tied to your desktop resolution and you have no real control over them in-game, beyond an internal resolution slider. There is also the lack of graphical options in general – around five meaningful settings overall, along with anisotropic filtering, which everyone ends up ramping to the max anyway owing to its minuscule cost on today’s PC hardware. HDR also appears to be missing at first glance, but it is there, the option becoming available when HDR is enabled on the Windows desktop.
First impressions are mediocre then but what did impress me is Iron Galaxy’s approach to shader compilation. Hitching and stuttering in PC titles has become a heinous issue and it requires a proactive approach to ensure a stutter-free PC experience. The solution here is to compile them when the game loads for the first time. It’s a time-consuming process, clocking in at around ten minutes on a 12900K with high-end DDR5, so expect that to take longer on more mainstream processors. You can ignore this and plough on into gameplay, but loading takes longer and CPU utilisation increases as it’s essentially crunching shaders in the background as you play. I recommend waiting however long it takes for the process to complete before beginning the game proper.
