Games worth discovering

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s PC issues are a serious problem

4K View2023-04-29

Our evaluation copy of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor arrived just a couple days ago, and so I’m currently making my way through Respawn’s latest adventure with Cal Kestis and pals. So far I’m having a great time: It’s built on all the great systems established in Jedi: Fallen Order, expanding lightsaber combat, force powers, and the scope of each explorable region. Unfortunately, as you may have heard, the PC version of Survivor has some serious performance issues, and they’re significant enough to warrant a word of caution before you make the decision to buy right now.

Because I’ve been trying to make my way through the game for our full review, I haven’t had time to do a thorough analysis of the performance issues that are dragging framerates down well below 60 fps and often below 30. My hardware should be well up to the task: I’m running an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, an RTX 4070ti graphics card, and I’ve got 32GB RAM installed—there’s not much I can throw at this thing that’s going to make it chug.

What I’m seeing in Jedi: Survivor is consistently low framerates, even at lower visual quality presets. Dropping from “epic” to “high” resulted in a slight performance improvement, but going down to “medium” barely nudged framerates up at all—I was still dealing with 40-50 fps in most areas, with about a 10 fps drop whenever I entered a large open zone like the area around Rambler’s Reach on Koboh.

I’ve been playing with some basic performance monitoring enabled, and I’ve noticed that even when framerates dip, neither my CPU or GPU are anywhere near to being maxed out. I’ll see slowdowns while both are hovering at around 40% utilization, which suggests poor GPU optimization, but the issue may be elsewhere. My hunch is that a memory leak is unintentionally filling up either my system RAM or VRAM, but I’d need different tools and more tests to confirm this.

Another issue I’ve identified is that AMD FidelityFX, which normally would upscale a lower-resolution base canvas up to my monitor’s native resolution and provide a nice performance boost, doesn’t seem to work at all. In fact, with FidelityFX enabled, I’ve had worse framerates than I have with the option turned off. I’m not sure what the issue is, but that’s an important bug to fix.

It’s a shame, because from five hours or so that I’ve played so far, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a blast—fights are fun and dynamic, and I can see Cal’s development into a confident Jedi knight with his more acrobatic moves in combat and the new ways he can deal with enemies. There are some great new characters, Koboh is a stunning new location, and the world is packed with strange and wonderful creatures and flora. In a game that’s so focused on parry and strike timing, the performance problems I’ve encountered in Survivor are devastating.

I’m fairly confident that Respawn will be working around the clock to solve the most egregious issues with the PC port of Survivor, but my advice right now would be to either play on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, or to wait a week or so to see how things look after a couple patches.

Feedback