Hi everyone,

I've been trying to optimize The Last of Us Part I on my PC and I'd really appreciate some advice from people with experience tuning this game, especially on Pascal GPUs.

My system

• GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB
• CPU: Intel i7-6700K @ 4.0 GHz
• RAM: 16 GB DDR4
• OS: Windows 10 Pro
• Driver: 582.28
• Resolution: 1920x1080
• Monitor: Dell U2414H (60 Hz, no G-SYNC / FreeSync)

Current NVIDIA Control Panel settings

• Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
• Low Latency Mode: ON
• Texture Filtering Quality: Quality
• Vertical Sync: ON
• Triple Buffering: OFF
• Max Frame Rate: OFF
• Image Scaling: OFF

In-game VSync is OFF.

Graphics settings

I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the graphics settings instead of simply using the High preset.

Main changes include:

• High textures
• Reduced shadow quality
• Medium lighting
• Medium volumetrics
• High SSR
• Medium Screen Space Shadows
• High LOD
• High texture filtering

The goal was to maximize image quality while keeping good frame pacing.

Benchmark results

Built-in benchmark

Average FPS: 40.7

Minimum: 31.2

1% Low: 26.8

0.1% Low: 17.1

After tweaking settings

Average FPS: 42.8

Minimum: 29.6

1% Low: 21.5

0.1% Low: 16.9

Average FPS improved, but 1% lows became noticeably worse.

Real gameplay benchmark (heavy rain area)

10-minute gameplay session.

Average FPS: 37.8

Minimum: 17.8

Maximum: 57.9

1% Low: 20.6

0.1% Low: 7.4

This area includes heavy rain, wet surfaces, reflections, dynamic lighting and a lot of asset streaming.

What I've observed

• GPU usage stays close to 99% most of the time.
• CPU doesn't appear fully saturated.
• VRAM usage stays below the 8 GB limit.
• Using NVIDIA Control Panel VSync feels smoother and produces less tearing than the game's own VSync on my system.
• Lowering SSR settings didn't noticeably improve performance but did reduce visual quality, so I restored them.
• Shadow quality seems to have the biggest performance impact.

My questions

1. Does anyone with a GTX 1070 (or similar Pascal GPU) have settings that consistently outperform these results?
2. Are there any "hidden" settings that have a large FPS impact but minimal visual impact?
3. Have you found any NVIDIA Control Panel settings that improve frame pacing specifically for this game?
4. Is the poor 1% low performance mostly caused by the game engine and asset streaming, or do you think there are still settings worth adjusting?
5. Would you recommend targeting a stable 40–45 FPS with higher image quality instead of trying to reach 60 FPS on this hardware?

I'm happy to share my full graphics-settings.txt and MSI Afterburner hardware logs if that helps.

Thanks in advance!