The latest "Digital Foundry vs." feature takes a hard look at The Last of Us Remastered. One of the big promises for the release is that the game will have an unlocked framerate that will hit the sweet 60fps. Just how often does it hit that magical number, though?
To answer the question everyone's been asking, frame-rate isn't locked to 60fps, but The Last of Us Remastered does spend the vast majority of its time at the optimal refresh. Problems can kick in during busy combat scenes, and just like the PS3 version, particles and transparent effects in particular can take their toll - the first confrontation with a fungus-spewing Bloater sees frame-rate hit a minimum of 48fps.

The good news is that this is pretty much as bad as it got across multiple hours of gameplay, and it's telling that in the 14-minute performance analysis video below (comprised of a number of gameplay clips), the game holds its lock well for the vast majority of its duration.

That simply says that the game runs at or near 60fps most of the time outside of a few, rare occasions where it dips to 48fps for a brief moment. You can see their results for yourself in this YouTube video. The dip in question happens about 10 minutes in.


If the small dips are too much for you to handle, there is an option to lock the game to 30fps if you so desire. With the lower framerate lock you may also see some improved shadows in some areas. Digital Foundry also notes some of the other improvements made to the game.
Principally, we're looking at 1080p resolution at 60fps in both single and multi-player, a 4x detail increase to texture maps and a 2x resolution boost to shadow maps. Texture streaming is no longer required owing to the PS4's prodigious RAM, and there's longer draw distances, better LOD and improved particle effects. In essence, Naughty Dog has scaled up the original game to full HD and boosted assets to match, while doubling frame-rate.

The Last of Us Remastered comes out tomorrow on the PlayStation 4.