Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is now available to play, but prospective Force wielders should know there are some performance issues on PC causing stutters and low fps.
You may have trouble running the game on older hardware, so it’s imperative you at least meet the game requirements if you’re dead set on playing the game immediately. However, you’ll still run into performance issues regardless. You should expect lower performance than you’re used to in most titles. At least until some patches come out to bring balance to your framerates.
Galaxy-wide performance issues
We are currently in the review process for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and it’s apparent there’s potential for a smooth PC experience, but there appear to be two main behaviors characterizing the performance issues. The first is low GPU utilization and a potential framerate limit with the game engine. We can’t say this is the case for certain, but this screenshot demonstrates how the RTX 4080 is unable to break past 87-100 fps despite clear headroom for higher framerates.
Image by PC Invasion
Players will notice the other issue quite easily, and it’s none other than the notorious Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) stuttering. This is a known issue with a lot of games based on UE4, but it doesn’t appear to be related to shader compilation in this case since the stutters are persistent after sections fully load. Regardless, the stuttering in Jedi Survivor will need to be patched up.
Just for reference, the system we’re using for the review consists of an Intel 13900K, Nvidia RTX 4080, G.Skill DDR5 6400 32GBs, and a WD SN850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. The operating system is a recent installation of Windows 11 and it is optimized along with the latest drivers.
There’s no reason this PC shouldn’t be able to break past 144 fps. The giveaway for the potential framerate limit issue is the lack of any difference when lowering the resolution. Where one would expect higher fps at lower resolutions, the GPU simply uses less power and the framerate stays the same.
Aside from the PC performance issues, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor does feel like a blast to play so far and looks gorgeous thanks to the art style, high-detail models and textures, and the HDR controls. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of optimization work that still needs to be done for it to run properly. Looking back, EA probably should have delayed the game further than it did for a potentially better launch on PC.
