What you need to know
- While the game itself has been highly praised, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is catching a lot of heat from players angry about the game's terrible performance.
- Both the console and PC versions of the game have issues, though the PC port is significantly less stable.
- One player uploaded a video to Twitter showing that despite turning down every setting in the game to Low, significantly reducing the resolution, and using Ultra Performance AMD FSR2, the game could barely maintain a mid-50s framerate during basic gameplay sequences.
- Respawn Entertainment says patches that will fix bugs and improve performance are coming "in the weeks ahead."
Update 4/28/23 at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET: Respawn Entertainment has released a statement about the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and the issues that players are experiencing with it, noting that the studio is "working to address these cases quickly."
"While there is no single, comprehensive solution for PC performance, the team has been working on fixes we believe will improve performance across a spectrum of configurations," the developers wrote. "We are committed to fixing these issues as soon as possible, but each patch requires significant testing to ensure we don't introduce new problems. Thanks for understanding and apologies to any of our players experiencing these issues."
A note from the Jedi Team on the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor pic.twitter.com/C3bp78VICrApril 28, 2023
Our original story is below.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is finally here, but unfortunately, its performance and stability on PC has proven to be very rough. Multiple reviewers warned fans of issues like huge framerate drops, crashes, and stutters ahead of the game's launch, and now that it's in their hands, players are discovering just how severe the problems are. At the time of writing, only 35% of the 2,268 reviews on Steam are positive, resulting in Survivor getting a "Mostly Negative" on its launch day.
When you experience bad performance in a PC game, it's natural to think you can improve it by lowering the game's graphics settings. This tends to help in most cases, but in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, doing so appears to have little to absolutely no effect. In a Twitter video, YouTuber Mutahar shows that despite turning down every setting in the game to Low, disabling ray tracing, using the Ultra Performance preset of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2, and even lowering the resolution to a measly 1024x768 pixels, Survivor still doesn't even come close to a smooth 60 FPS.
As you can see in the clip, the framerate barely manages to stay in the 50s with these ultra-low settings even though there's nothing going on in the scene. I imagine that things dipped even lower when any type of combat with Imperial forces started.
BRO IT GETS WORSE pic.twitter.com/4nU45ljUHQApril 28, 2023
If a YouTuber's beastly RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 5950X rig can't even hit 60 FPS using the lowest settings possible, it's clear that there are some deeper issues here that can't be mitigated by user tweaks. Many players and Mutahar's performance analysis software both report low GPU and CPU utilization, so perhaps that's the root of the game's broken state. Hopefully developer Respawn Entertainment can resolve this and other Star Wars Jedi: Survivor issues, bugs, and glitches soon.
The trend of major games launching with unplayable PC ports is incredibly worrying, and it's gotten to the point where I don't even bother buying new PC games until several weeks or months after they release so I don't have to deal with a giant list of technical problems. Granted, the console editions of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have several issues, too, but it's clear that they're still much more stable than the version PC gamers got.
The developers have said that patches "in the weeks ahead" will fix bugs and improve performance. Until those updates arrive and the community confirms they're effective, though, I'd avoid buying Survivor on PC. It may eventually become one of the best PC games for Star Wars lovers, but right now, you should pass.
