DF speaks with key figures from Nixxes and Naughty Dog.
As usual, the interview below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
When did the project for The Last of Us Part 2 on PC begin?
What are the origins of the current release?
Some time in the fall of last year, Iron Galaxy rolled off, with Nixxes joining the project.
What are the origins of the Naughty Dog engine on PC?
It ships on DirectX 12, but presumably it must have existed in some prior form.
Travis McIntosh:Obviously the work on The Last of Us Part 1 for PC helped with this.
So there was very little PC support at all in the project.
The engine hadn’t changed that much between projects.
That took quite some time, but our experience helped a lot.
That is actually our next question.
Wessel de Groot:In terms of gathering, it’s pretty much the same.
We just let QA play the game and collect the PSOs.
Those are the basics of the new system.
On the next frame, it’s hopefully done, and then we can actually show the object.
Does it happen every time after a cutscene, or what triggers it?
Wessel de Groot:It’s based on streaming.
So whatever new stuff is streamed in, then the PSO compiles start.
Another change is the addition of dynamic resolution scaling - what was it like adding that in?
Yana Mateeva:Oh yeah, it was interesting.
The actual engine lent itself quite well to implementing dynamic resolution scaling.
So on that front, it was not a very super difficult experience and it worked quite well.
But yeah, it comes with the territory.
What cross-game libraries, other than dynamic resolution scaling, did Nixxes bring to this project?
Coen Frauenfelder:We brought a lot of them!
Besides that, all game inputs are going through our systems, as well as display handling and upscalers.
Could you talk about the changes to streaming, vis a vis DirectStorage?
Coen Frauenfelder:Actually, the system lends itself very well to DirectStorage.
We’re just using CPU decompression, without GPU decompression.
Is the game using any of the more “low-level” features that are possible with DX12?
Wessel de Groot :We are using async compute and wave intrinsics.
Travis McIntosh:It’s just great on PS5, there’s almost nothing between us and the hardware.
And props to Nixxes for figuring out how what might happen on 100,000 different configurations.
Where are the wealth of PSOs coming from?
So it is a very large number of different permutations and that’s always been the challenge.
And I think with how Nixxes handles it, it’s pretty seamless for most consumers.
It’s a night-and-day difference; loading chapters and getting into the game is much faster.
Are PSOs the largest contributing factor in load times?
The PC version can be much faster loading than the PS5 version, depending on your PC.
What are the challenges in translating that to PC where things are less bare metal, and more abstracted?
Coen Frauenfelder:It’s a new engine to us, so that’s always a challenge.
Wessel de Groot:One thing is the spin locking.
That is cheap on the console, but on Windows, that can be very problematic for performance.
That’s one thing that we addressed for this port in particular.
Did you switch tomutex?
I’d say it’s one of the better job systems I’ve worked with in my career.
So we had to come up with a sort of a different construct for that.
I think we managed quite well there.
It was challenging to reduce that as we never had to worry about it on console.
Looking towards the future, I imagine Naughty Dog will eventually want to bring other titles to PC.
What was it like working on this versus something like the PC version of Ghost of Tsushima?
We had to really think, “How can we improve this?”
We were quite involved in, for example, tweaking the scalability for the game.
Can we maybe make a better user experience?
And that was quite an interesting part of the project for me.
We have the new maps for “No Return”.
Bill and Marlene are playable.
We’re very excited that we got those into the PC version of the game.
Travis McIntosh:I personally just love ultra-widescreen.
I love big wide screens at home.
Coen Frauenfelder:Yeah, for me, it is actually very simple.
It’s a beautiful product.
I love The Last of Us.
I played it, I think, on every platform that it came out on.
Being able to work on that with Nuaghty Dog was a dream come true.
But that’s a personal thing.
Wessel de Groot:Yeah, same.
That makes you focus on deciding on what the added value we provide is.
We things would we have done differently.
You have to be on the look-out.
You have to ask, “Did we miss something, something we didn’t touch at all?”
So it was a very different experience.
