Alright, these are gonna be some harsh words that I´m about to say but I´ll say them anyway.
TLOU is an incredible game and I dont think that its necessary to explain why.
At this point everyone and their mothers have heard about the game so let´s skip that part.
I myself experienced TLOU shortly after release on the PS3 and have never heard about the game in any way possible.
When i got to play it, I was hooked on it so bad that i bought the game 3 more times.
Yes i bought the PS4 Remastered twice (Cause i lost the first copy) and after almost 10 years of waiting I bought it for the PC for the Full Price.... AGAIN, but now I´m finally able to play it... or am I?

Well release wasnt that pleasant but heres a short Rundown on how its state for me was on release, and how it is now.

For my Specs I´m running a Ryzen 5 2600 with 16 Gb of Ram, for the Gpu I´m having a RX5700XT (and yes its being bottlenecked by the Cpu) and im playing on a Full HD Monitor with only 60 hz cause my 144hz Monitor broke recently.
I also have FSR 2.0 activated on the "Quality" Setting.

Okay lets get started:
Release: The game was literally unplayable for me. Besides the extremely Long Shader Cache installation the game itself was horrible and in an absolute unacceptable state.
I had LOADING WINDOWS MID GAME. Even the Ps3 didnt have this (and yes I know the game is specifically coded for the ps3 and other Console Plattforms) but why did they decide to let the Worst Porting studio in the History of PC-Porting handle the biggest Trademark of their company. Well i had the game on all settings, Strict and Mixed (sometimes it didnt even care what my settings were and loaded low poly models instead) and it was just unplayable in every way so i decided to wait.

Patch 1.0.1.5: I mean... it fixed some stuff?
I still resorted to the widelyspread Oodle fix wich did increase my performance a bit and made it "playable" but not enjoyable. Still I managed to play for couple of hours wihtout wanting to rethink my choices in life.

Patch 1.0.2.0: Okay now we´re talking.
There are some major improvements for stability and performance in general.
Also they fixed the high Vram usage which was just a display error.
It wasnt displaying the right amount of vram usage when changing graphic settings.
Also it reduced the overall Cpu usage which is always nice.

Patch 1.0.2.1: Wonderful.
They fixed an Issue where you had massive camera jitter which was just unbearable.
Small Patch but definitely an Improvement.
At this point I´m also halfway through the Game.

Patch 1.0.3.0: What happened???
This patch focused on mostly audio based issues and various issues across the board but it somehow managed to kinda tank the performance a bit. At this point im almost done with the game but I noticed that my ram was filling to the brim and suddenly dumps everything leaving my cpu to be overloade and my storage doing nothing,
This causes my game to be left at about 30-40 fps for couple of minutes until my ram has been build up again.

Patch 1.0.4.0: WOW.
I finished the game before the Patch released but I´m playing my NG+ save on this patch and ist awesome.
Finally something with not only Major improvements, I´d say they´re Gigantic Improvements.
-More Graphic Settings
-Optimized CPU and GPU Usage
-Much better Performance
-More acceptable Loading Times (Still faster then GTA V)
-Better Texture Streaming across the Board
-And a much more fluent Experience
All the annoying issues at the beginning were gone or mostly fixed.
There are still some major issues, such as the definite memory leak that is happening and I´m pretty sure they can get it much more optimized, but overall the game is moving in a playable and enjoyable state...

which is exactly what it should because i think TLOU is an experience everyone should take the chance to have this experience. And without ad oubt, this remke of the game IS the definitive edition.
Still as a long time fan since the beginning, I´m more then dissapointed in what stae the long awaited PC-Port arrived and i hope for Naughty Dog that the can make this Port to state that its meant to be played, because as it is, it is disrespecting towards themselves, their whole Fanbase (which isnt a small one) and the story that is being told inside the Game.
And thats that.

Edit: Patch 1.0.5 has been released a couple of hours ago. Ill try to play it as soon as the 50gb update has finished.
Its focusing on every major issue so im excited to see for myself how it played out.
Also I know there are a lot of grammar issues in my review so far, but i aint gonna fix them, so go ahead, sue me.
Alright the Patch did fix a lot of stuff but theres something weird about it.
At this point im now able to play the game on Medium-High Settings without FSR Upscaling, and im reaching around 50-60 fps much more stable.
It aint perfect, but its more then playable, its almost enjoyable.
They also fixed the overloading ram issue that set my ram back for about 2-4 gb in space which is a lot.
There are more graphic settings, better resource utilization etc. but there is no real performance bump...
Yes the game runs much more stable and the frametimes are much tighter then before, but real preformance improvements in terms of raw fps, there is no significant difference, but I feel like this is the first version that should have gone to retail.

(Edit 30.05 Patch 1.0.5.1)
This patch does focus on stability improvements, even though I did not notice any real performance difference, I did notice a much faster boot and loading time then before. (This may vary tho)
Not much else then that but better then nothing :)
I´ll be keeping on updating until this game is in an almost perfect state.

Guess who´s back? Well that´d be me.
And I got some news.

I´ve noticed that there was a lot more fuss about TLOU since the release of the Part 2 Remaster on the PS5. There are a lot of speculations that it might release on to the PC aswell and that might spark some fellow gamers to play the first part, especially because it is much cheaper to get now.

But the question is... is it really fixed?
Because i went through the reviews of the game and some people are still suffering from crashes, stuttering and other, more weird problems. (Btw, dont even bother checking out Naughty Dogs "Known Issues" page, they didnt update it in a long time and there are still notes referring to old and fixed problems)
The game overall was playable the last time I played it, but maybe all this optimisation led to... lets say, complicated issues.

Right now ill be checking out the newest version which is v.1.1.2 on the 7th of february.
Im still using the same specs for reference at 1080p 60hz.

I am also running on the latest Radeon Drivers (24.1.1) with Anti-Lag and Enhanced Sync Enabled. (Anti-Lag for the best Frametimes possible and Enhanced Sync, cause in my opinion its better then normal V-Sync and its open-source sooo...)

Im playing on custom settings, balancing my cpu and gpu usage around the medium to high settings.

Shader cache building took me over 35 minutes but thats still faster then the 2 hours at launch, still not acceptable, and the game ran at around 55-60 fps with FSR disabled.
Enabling it doesnt make a big difference so ill leave it off.
But its playable it feels a bit smoother then the last time and i didnt notice anything off tbh.

So all the haters that say the game isnt optimized yet, well it isnt, but it was worse and now its playable, but you still need a good pc.
The game is very Cpu intensive and a good gpu doesnt hurt in that case, so if you want to play the game on its max settings, you need a pc that can handle it.

So thats it for my update on this, enjoy the game, love you and see you if Part 2 releases
(Had to shorten the review, it got too long :))