The review embargo for Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the direct sequel to 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, dropped yesterday. Overall, the game was praised as a solid sequel to an already great game; you can find Kai’s full review of the PS5 version here.
However, the performance seems to be one of the game’s main issues at launch, particularly on PC. German website GameStar posted a gameplay video of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor running on a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, and 32GB of RAM; at 1440p resolution, the game cannot even always maintain 60 frames per second, not to mention the VRAM usage is nearly 20GB. All of that is nearly ludicrous. GameStar had detailed CapFrameX metrics enabled, so we can see that the GPU is often stuck at just about half utilization, indicating big issues with optimization even with the Game Ready driver released by NVIDIA. GameStar also notes that the console version is far from immune from performance issues, anyway, as even the Performance mode on PlayStation 5 is currently plagued by noticeable frame rate drops.
GameStar was far from the only magazine to complain about the performance of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Latin American website PCMRace wrote:
The optimization, unfortunately, is just plain a mess on PC. With a Ryzen 9 5950X, 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3080 Ti, the game barely runs at 30-40 FPS at best. The problem, similar to other titles like Hogwarts Legacy, is that 12GB of VRAM isn’t enough for 4K gaming, causing gameplay in certain areas to drop to 20 FPS or below. I mean, unplayable. In a specific part, I had to lower the resolution to 1440p or lower the details to Low-Medium because there was no way the game would go above 15 FPS due to lack of VRAM.
As expected, lower end PCs suffer even more from the current state of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. PC Gamer’s reviewer pointed out that he was lucky to run the game at an average of 35 FPS in the open world sections of Koboh with his RTX 2080 Super. He also lamented the absence of NVIDIA DLSS support (Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is an AMD-partnered game), as FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 provided a blurry image, particularly of the characters’ faces.
There is hope yet, as a day one patch has yet to land for the PC version and should be available later today. EA promised on Twitter ‘weeks’ of fixes coming to the title. Still, Electronic Arts hasn’t had the best track record for actually improving its disappointing PC launches this year. The stuttering seen in the Dead Space remake and the awful technical issues that abound in Wild Hearts are both still far from fixed.
I haven’t got the chance to try Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, as Electronic Arts didn’t provide a pre-release PC code for performance testing. However, the game is out tomorrow, and I’ll check it out right away.
