It's fair to say that the PC port of The Last of Us Part 1 wasn't a huge success to begin with. Original developers Naughty Dog and porting team Iron Galaxy produced a conversion that performed rather poorly and was blighted by excessive shader compilation, bugs, and memory leaks. It took a good while but eventually, most of the issues were resolved, though the clunky shader compilation stage still remains.
So when it was announced that Naughty Dog had brought in Nixxes Software to join Iron Galaxy for the PC port of The Last of Us Part 2, I was quietly confident that this conversion would be a much smoother affair, not least because Nixxes has developed some clever tools to optimise shader compilation and it has a good track record of porting Sony's classic games.
