The last time a performance patch was applied to The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog admitted that there was still work to be done. Well, it seems that work has indeed been done. Because the latest patch was good enough to earn Steam Deck Verified status.

The Last of Us: Part I finally arrived on PC in March, and it's safe to say it wasn't terribly optimized. In early Steam feedback, about two-thirds of PC gamers returned negative feedback thanks to a variety of issues ranging from crashes on first launch and huge wait times for initial shader compilation to excessive VRAM usage.

Things were bad enough to elicit an apology from Naughty Dog, and Steam issued a refund regardless of play time and revoked the game's Verified status in early April.

Previous patches have addressed at least some of these issues. However, this new patch, version 1.1.0, appears to bring the game to the state it should be at launch, although it is worth noting that installing the patch triggers a complete rebuild of the shaders.

In any case, the patch notes for the Steam Deck are as follows:

Meanwhile, the general release notes are as follows:

All release notes are available on the Naughty Dog website; Naughty Dog According to them, there are still some known issues, such as shaders taking longer than expected to load, memory leaks, and shader corruption. In other words, it appears their work is not completely done. However, the fact that the game has re-acquired Steam Deck Verified Status certainly suggests that the most painful problems have been fixed.