Yesterday, we reported that a number of PlayStation 4 games recently received updates presumably for support on the PlayStation 5. Patch notes for all of them are vague (the usual “bug fixes”) but we can now confirm that at least one of the games has had its load times reduced drastically. That game is Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Remastered.
Twitch streamer Anthony Calabrese was one of the first to notice the change.
Patch 1.11 of TLOU made it so loading screens are basically non-existent on PS4. This is for both ssd and hdd. Sections load in asap and I can save almost 18 seconds in the David fight. Everyone go and check. Was this the patch’s intention? @Naughty_Dog @BadData_ @arnemeyer
— Anthony Calabrese (@AnthonyCaliber) October 24, 2020
Words aren’t good enough to describe the difference so here’s a video courtesy of YouTuber ElAnalistaDeBits:
Social media users have since been asking why the load times weren’t reduced until now. While there’s no official word from Sony or Naughty Dog on the matter, one Twitter user seems to have a plausible explanation: Sony’s new compression algorithms, which we recently detailed.
I think I can explain this!
It is because PS4 and PS5 just recently started using new compression algorithms called Kraken and Oodle Textures to make loading faster. These are better than the old compression on PS4 called Zlib.
PS5 will not take 5 sec to load, it will be instant.— KeanuReaves (@_KeanuReaves) October 24, 2020
Whatever the case, we can’t wait to see what the load times look like on the PS5!
