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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor PC patches tested: less stuttering, still slowA stubborn malaise hangs over stability and ray tracing improvements
A stubborn malaise hangs over stability and ray tracing improvements
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Star Wars Jedi: Survivordevelopers Respawn Entertainment have been busy on patch duty, pumping out aseries of updatesaimed at addressing the torrid state of itsPC performance at launch. The newest, last week’s Patch 4, sounded particularly enthusiastic about tackling Jedi: Survivor’s technical troubles, so now would be a fine time to check in on the progress of this fixing-upping campaign.
A few droid decapitatin’ benchmark runs later, I can say that Patch 4 (and its predecessors) have made meaningful improvements toray tracingperformance, and that there’s a lot less stuttering than there was at launch - even if this hasn’t been smoothed out entirely. General performance, however, remains deeply underwhelming, with powerfulGPUsstill unable to achieve a bulletproof 60fps even at 1080p.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Has Big “Prequel Memes” Energy (PC Review)Alice chatted to Liam about her favourite thing in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.Watch on YouTube
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Has Big “Prequel Memes” Energy (PC Review)
Since I’m still in a bit of a tables mood after thatAsus ROG Ally vs Steam Deckpiece, let’s compare Jedi Survivor’s current and launch day performance using a nicely readable stack of cells. All these results, which represent average performance in one of the free-roaming areas on planet Koboh, were recorded on a PC comprised of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, Intel Core i5-11600K, and 16GB of DDR4 memory.
There are positive signs here. Patch 4’s ray tracing-specific enhancements appear to pay dividends, with a generous 22% performance boost compared to launch day. Anecdotally, my RTX 3070 rig had a much easier time staying above 30fps with both RT effects and the Epic preset switched on, resulting in visibly smoother play. Good stuff for those with strong enough graphics cards to handle ray tracing in the first place.
Unfortunately, neither of these really make Jedi: Survivor’s PC performance good, merelyless bad. The Epic quality preset gets a little bump at both 1080p and 1440p, but Medium and Low remain bafflingly close-run, with 1080p / Low actually averaging 1fps slower than it did at launch. If anything, the lower settings were where Jedi: Survivor needed the most work; when they run only very slightly faster than maximum quality, it effectively blocks access to anyone wanting to play on older PC hardware or aSteam Deck.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
It should be noted, amidst the moans, that more patches are on the way. At least one of these will include “general performance improvements to improve both CPU and GPU utilization,” which could be vital in wringing extra performance out of lower-end hardware while simultaneously letting higher-end PCs off the leash. That’s the hope, anyway. Which I understand is quite a potent thing in Wars of the Star.
Lastly, I never experienced most of the bugs that have been listed as fixed in the past few patches, but I have noticed that Respawn mended the one glitch I quite enjoyed: the ghosts of slain enemies popping back up in an intimidating A-pose whenever you zoom out the photo mode camera. Here are some of my favourite snaps, in memoriam:
Image credit:EA / Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:EA / Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:EA / Rock Paper Shotgun
