Digital Foundry has revealed in their reports that Star Wars Jedi Survivor has been compromised in both PC and PlayStation 5.
For people wondering why the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X have not received similar reports, the main bottleneck has been that EA did not provide copies for review to Digital Foundry. That report will have to wait a few days or weeks, but Xbox Series owners will definitely want to know how the game is performing on other platforms.
Now, Star Wars Jedi Survivor performs better on PlayStation 5 than on PC, but don’t let that ‘performs better’ phrasing mislead you. Star Wars Jedi Survivor wasn’t ready to be published on PC. On PlayStation 5, the game is compromised that it does not perform consistently even on 30 FPS.
Digital Foundry’s reviewers also made a very good point of contention, revealing that Respawn’s original game, Star Wars Fallen Order, also launched with performance issues across all platforms. Star Wars Jedi Survivor has released with more issues than Star Wars Fallen Order did upon its release.
In regards to the PC version, a big point of contention is that the UI and settings features don’t seem to work the way they are supposed to. Changing some settings do not lead to any improvements, and sometimes makes performance worse.
The game is also only compatible with FSR2, bypassing XCSS and DLSS. But of course, FSR2 implementation is also poor, and changing settings there could make it worse.
There are also issues of shader compilation stutter and frame time stutter. These issues occur on any PC build, with any combination of parts. No matter how powerful your hardware or how low you put the settings, these issues are just part of the game.
But the main issue that should have made EA decide to delay this PC launch was CPU utilization. Performance is hampered because the game only uses two CPU threads, even on CPUs that have four or more threads. Similarly, it doesn’t make use of the GPU, at all. This leads to Star Wars Jedi Survivor simply not performing at its very best in any scenario.
You can watch Digital Foundry’s video on the PC version below.
On PlayStation 5, the game is more than playable, and it does have some merits. Ray tracing is used selectively throughout the game, for global illumination, and to depict bodies of water. It’s a pity that frame rates also drop in the parts of the game that utilize it.
Subsequently, this version’s problems come to light when looking at its Performance and Resolution Modes.
On Resolution Mode, the game targets 30 FPS at a resolution of 4K. In reality, it achieves a minimum resolution of 978p to a maximum of 1440p. It only hits that 1440p performance mark in cutscenes.
On Performance mode, the game targets 60 FPS at a resolution of 1440p. In reality, it achieves a minimum resolution of 648p to a maximum of 864p. Performance Mode also goes back to 30 FPS for cutscenes, so that’s the only way you can reach that resolution metric. Unfortunately, in parts of the game that transition between cutscenes and gameplay, it dips to below 30 FPS on both modes.
The combination of ray tracing and FSR utilization led to Respawn achieving a certain image quality level on PlayStation 5. However, this led to compromises, and that compromise is why Star Wars Jedi Survivor performs worse than its predecessor, Star Wars Fallen Order.
Digital Foundry came to the conclusion that Resolution Mode ironically has better performance than Performance Mode. If you are one of those gamers that values 60FPS framerate and above, you may not want this game right now, on any platform.
While it’s possible that Xbox Series X will tell a different story, it’s really unlikely, as this seems to be part of Respawn’s problems in development for all platforms. While it’s unfortunate that we are once again pondering poor performance of a new game at launch, hopefully Respawn can address these issues in a timely manner.
You can watch Digital Foundry’s video on the PlayStation 5 version below.
