Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection Performance Review

Nathan Drake is back once again with his first PlayStation 5 adventure, bringing Chloe and friends along for an updated and upgraded dual package of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the spinoff Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Offering enhancements and some huge performance leaps over the globetrotting thief’s PS4 & PS4 Pro release. But is a treasure worth fighting for?

This new remaster offers a few paths to play, with existing disc or digital owners of the PS4 version of either included game being able to upgrade for $10s, euros, or great British pounds to this new pack. Or you can make a full purchase if you’re new to the Uncharted fold, and even PC players will get a release later this year. As we have seen in previous remasters from Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima, you can easily import your PS4 save using the main menu’s in-built conversation tool. Allowing you to pick up where you left off – just sharper and faster than before. Simply download or USB copy your save over to your ps5 drive, then fire it up and convert it to a PS5 format. Note that you can copy multiple saves; you simply need to do them one at a time from the main menu.

Indiana Modes

The biggest upgrades are resolution and performance, with Legacy of Thieves offering three modes of play. Sadly, there is no multiplayer included in this version, which is a shame as one mode would’ve really helped that style of gameplay. The first of the trio of modes is Fidelity, which runs at a sharp and crisp 3840×2160 (aka 4K) resolution at the same 30fps as the PS4 & Pro version, which run at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, respectively. This helps all related buffers within the image, such as alpha textures, shadows, screen space reflections, and more.

Sadly, there is no multiplayer included in this version.

Next – and likely the most popular – is Performance mode, which offers the same 2560×1440 resolution of the PS4 Pro by doubling framerates to 60fps by halving frame-times to 16.67ms. The loss in pixel clarity from 4K is a minor but noticeable sacrifice, but the gain in temporal pixel counts and extra fluidity is a welcome one, specifically considering the controller input latency which I will get to later.

What We Said About Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is a remarkable achievement in blockbuster storytelling and graphical beauty. Though it’s let down by a lack of imagination and some self-indulgence, especially in a third act that drags on far too long, Uncharted 4 carries on the series’ proud tradition of peerless polish and style, with a great multiplayer component to boot. Most importantly, it’s a gentle sendoff to the rag-tag group of characters we’ve known for nine years. A worthy thief’s end, indeed. – Lucy O’Brien, May 10, 2016

Score: 9

Read the full Uncharted 4 Review

Finally, we have the Perf+ mode, which again doubles framerates over the Performance mode to 120fps – so long as you have a TV to support that. The cost is, again, resolution, which now drops by 50% to 1080p, matching the base PS4 but running at four times the framerate. This mode is clearly the one that looks the softest on a 4K screen, but the latency improvements are again noticeable even over the 60fps Performance mode. No Dynamic resolution scaling appears to be in use but the engine’s temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) helps minimize noisy segments and the MB shutter speed has been increased to compensate for the faster framerates, which helps improve clarity in motion on objects, textures, and more over the PS4 and PS4 Pro. All three modes are available in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy and can easily be swapped in the menus with no delay, meaning you can pick your poison between pixel clarity or pixel frequency, and swap between them based on what you’re doing at the time.

With a game such as Uncharted, the increased controller refresh fluidity is beneficial, if not game changing. What is a humongous improvement, though, is the cartridge-like loading times – or rather the near lack thereof. Even on an SSD-powered PS4 Pro the load from a save unpacking into RAM can take over 36 seconds; on PS5, Legacy of Thieves is over 10 times faster, with loads now taking approximately three seconds and effectively removed. Menus simply fade out and the action fades in. This shift to a native PS5 app enabled Naughty Dog to leverage the SSD speed most integral to the memory subsystem configuration, all within the new SDK and relevant API calls. In addition, the Legacy of Thieves version has a smaller in footprint on your drive due to the Oodle texture compression tech and dedicated compression hardware built into the PS5’s system on a chip (SoC). With both games installed, it occupies 40% less drive space as a whole.

Performance

What of that performance then? Let’s start at the top: with Uncharted 4 and the PS4/Pro version, both targeted 30fps and in the majority of action, and they held close enough to that to never be an issue. One of the biggest and most frantic sections was the Raiders of the Lost Ark homage truck-and-jeep chase that was first revealed in the famous E3 2015 gameplay trailer. It saw dips on base PS4 and Pro to almost identical levels, mostly only into the next refresh cycle of 16ms, but this could see low 20fps moments crop up in brief segments of action, largely fill-rate and bandwidth-limited, but occasionally you could also get longer stutters with context switching. These cause 80 to 100ms spikes and hangs when they occur, pointing to CPU, memory, or other cache-related delays. These happen with the switch over to driving as the world simulation is warped back into line. As a 30fps game running on original PS4 hardware, though, it was solid.

It should come as no surprise to see that on PS5 it does not drop a stitch within the same stressful segments when running in the native 4K/30fps mode. It keeps the frame-time meter flatter than a bad guy’s ECG after a run-in with Nate the serial killer. This is true of the Fidelity mode both in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy.

Action-heavy scenes secure Performance as the preferred mode in my playthrough of the PS5 port.

Moving to the 60fps Performance mode, we do now start to see some drops in these same heavier sections of Uncharted 4 and some of the battles in Lost Legacy as well. They’ve been always minor and never that frequent in my run of play, but when it happens it skips into the next refresh cycle and they never add more than short-lived, mid-50fps segments. Most action scenes, cinematics, and exploration are at a steady 60fps, which is a solid boost from the previous 30fps ceiling. The same scenarios and sections play out in both games and really secure Performance as the preferred mode in my playthrough of the PS5 port.

What We Said About Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy succeeds on the strength of its protagonists, writing, and phenomenal depiction of India’s jungles and ruins. Being in the company of Chloe and Nadine keeps its overly familiar action sequences and disappointingly empty open-world area interesting, and it regains its footing in smart puzzles and thrilling cinematic moments. -Marty Sliva, August 16, 2017

Score: 7.5

Read the full Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Review

The final Performance+ 120fps mode is the most demanding on CPU time, and any bottlenecks that may crop up when trying to target such a high refresh rate of 8ms. As such, we can see more frequent dips from this target in both games across action, and they are the biggest when driving across the wide, linear levels in the jeep. Uncharted 4 does come out on top, maintaining frame rates above 100fps in my tested segments. Again, due to 8ms frame time being half that of 60fps the drops here are almost imperceptible when they crop up. The Lost Legacy, on the other hand, can be a little heavier on the GPU and fill-rate with all the foliage amongst the battles, which see us drop close to that 100fps line more often and into the 90s when we look at long terrain views while driving. These are again, brief, and infrequent enough to not be of a great concern, but they’re the only drops I really noticed without the frame-rate tool picking them up.

Also, with this being a PS5 port of the Pro version now running at four times the framerate, we do see some physics glitches and sped-up animation crop up at times. They’re noticeable when they do, but are rarely game-breaking. The extra fluidity offered by the 120fps mode from the movement and the controller input times are excellent, though. Alongside the DualSense improvements of Haptic Feedback and adaptive triggers, we can see huge reductions in input times, which is a key area of the Naughty Dog engine. They stagger work over three frames in addition to any core engine polling latency, meaning that each frame is treated to CPU-GPU-render stages. Based on the PS4 Pro, we see approximately 144ms of input time as the median, i.e., the most likely input times from a collection of tested actions. This is slightly slower by 4 to 8ms on the PS5 in the 30fps Fidelity mode, but we see big and noticeable reductions on this as we move through 60 and then 120fps modes, with 120fps being sub-100ms and approximately 60ms at the absolute best point.

Summary

Uncharted 4 is The Last Crusade for Nate in more ways than one. Here it is refined, smoother, faster, and sharper, but not to a level I am sure many hoped. Unlike God of War on PC, which we covered a couple of weeks ago, we get no further bells and whistles over PS4 Pro. Improved textures and resolution are the only minor visual boosts, with level of detail, ambient occlusion, and others all remaining the same. These would still not transform Uncharted 4 or The Lost Legacy, but might have enticed more returning fans to double dip on the Legacy of Thieves Collection. It remains to be seen what the PC version scheduled for later this year will offer over this one; support for a 21:9 aspect ratio would be great to add. Overall, Legacy of Thieves on PS5 is a great update to those than prefer faster and cleaner images but more aimed at those diving into either of these for the first time, or the cheaper $10 option for the hardcore who want to double dip. It’s a refined and improved version for sure, which highlights just how far Naughty Dog was ahead of the pack even in 2016. But for anything over sheer performance and controller improvements, you may be left wanting a little more treasure.