Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection – PC vs. PS5 Performance Review
Nathan Drake is the latest PlayStation star to join the migration of Sony’s catalog to PC. The Legacy of Thieves collection, which launched on PS5 last year with enhanced versions of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and its expansion, The Lost Legacy, arrives this week on PC.
With many at Sony’s internal porting studio, Nixxes, otherwise engaged, the honours here fell upon Iron Galaxy, which has also made a name for itself as a proficient porting studio. The task was to take the roots of the older Naughty Dog engine used on the PS5 remasters and port them over to PC running under the DirectX12 API. It’s a considerable challenge, given the varied nature of the PC platform being the polar opposite to the bespoke nature of the engine designed for PlayStation hardware directly.
One big hurdle for developers in the PC space with DirectX12 is that of shaders, and more specifically shader compilation. These chunky GPU code routines are required on a platform-by-platform basis with consoles and even fixed hardware such as the Steam Deck. But on PC, you will require all or some bespoke shaders to be compiled, depending on the generation, make, and model of your GPU. These may be as simple as drawing the UI for 3D objects when you click the stick, to rendering in an explosion with GPU particles and more.
As such, the team has taken an Async approach, just as we saw in Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man. Essentially, they create these across one or more CPU threads as soon as you load into the game and during play. The aim here is to create all the required GPU shaders for every possible area of the game, store them in a local cache on your hard drive, and call them when needed. Due to this cost, you will need a fast CPU to enable the game
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