Low-Level Optimizations in The Last of Us Part II by Parikshit Saraswat || SIGGRAPH 2020

Developing a game that satisfies high expectations on visual quality while running at 30 fps on a 6 year old console platform, PlayStation 4, is quite a challenging task. The majority of the world of The Last of Us Part II contains alpha geometry which has poor rendering pipeline performance and full-screen expensive shaders with heavy resource usage. This required us to use plenty of hacks and tricks to push the hardware to its limits and make sure we don’t have to needlessly compromise on the visual fidelity of the game. This talk mainly focuses on case studies from the actual game highlighting the most expensive parts of our game’s frame and how we were able to come up with solutions to these performance hurdles. Check out more SIGGRAPH 2020 Presentations on the Naughty Dog Research Blog: