Jedi Survivor Receives First Patch Addressing Performance Issues

Jedi: Survivor
(Image credit: Aaron Klotz)

Update 5/2/2023 02:22PT

In the original article we incorrectly indicated that some issues present in the console versions would be fixed with this update. That was incorrect. A patch set for release on May 2nd is set to address these issues for consoles.

Updated article:

As promised, the team behind Jedi: Survivor has released a new patch for the game, addressing several bugs and performance problems related to the PC version. Some of these issues include performance problems for non-raytraced graphics modes, game crashes, and bugs tied to VFTX, AI, cinematics, and more. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles will get these same fixes tomorrow.

To catch you up on the situation in general, Jedi: Survivor has become one of the most controversial game launches in recent memory in the few days since its launch, due to the game's extraordinary performance hiccups on PC hardware. In fact, Digital Foundry has called out Jedi: Survivor as the Worst Triple-A Port of 2023 So Far. The issues surrounding the game include severe frame rate drops, bad frame rates in general, insane VRAM utilization, and almost incessant micro stuttering when moving about the game world. And that's not even mentioning the game-breaking bugs.

The game's performance issues began to crop up a day before the game launched, with reviewers and content creators reporting serious performance issues with the pre-released version of the game. The worst reviews reported that the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 couldn't even run the game at a steady 60FPS, no matter what graphical settings were used. 

The launch day impressions from both game reviewers and gamers alike were not that much better, with many reporting similar performance issues with Jedi: Survivor. Though thankfully the game appears to be playable for most right now, with many gaming videos, reviews, and reports indicating playable frame rates and even 60+ frame rates in some cases (as reported by Hardware Unboxed). Though the game's performance is still far from perfect.

(Image credit: Aaron Klotz)

I will note, however, that my experience has been surprisingly good with my RTX 2060 Super and Ryzen 7 5800X3D gaming machine. I've been playing Jedi: Survivor constantly since it launched, and I average playable performance in the 40s regularly. It's definitely not perfect, but playable nonetheless. After lots of tweaking with the game's graphics, I've learned that the game absolutely requires a restart after changing graphics settings in order to see normal performance, and the game's RT mode is very unoptimized right now. Also, enabling Nvidia Ultra Low Latency with Jedi: Survivor helps immensely to keep system latency down to a minimum.

The general consensus is that the game is suffering heavily from console-optimized texture optimizations on the PC version, which aren't designed for PC hardware. With how large Jedi: Survivor's world is, large amounts of textures and assets need to be housed in memory to prevent micro stuttering altogether. Latest-gen consoles are capable of holding all this data without slowing down, since the CPU and GPU share memory together. PC hardware does not do this, requiring data to be transferred constantly from system RAM to dedicated GPU VRAM, which slows down performance.

Another issue, which was even confirmed by EA, surrounds bad optimization on the CPU slowing down game performance. It appears the game is suffering from bad thread utilization, and is incapable of effectively utilizing more than a couple of threads at a time. However, the precise issue surrounding the CPU bottlenecking is still unknown, and highly speculative, so take any opinions on this subject with a grain of salt.

Thankfully, EA has promised to fix the game's poor optimizations on PC and has already begun to fulfill that promise with this new patch. But the patch notes are mostly focused on fixing bugs rather than optimizing performance, with only one sentence addressing performance improvements for the game on PC, and they only apply to the non-raytraced parts of the graphics pipeline.

In my limited playtime with the patch, I found it to be an underwhelming first update on my RTX 2060 Super/Ryzen 7 5800X3D gaming machine. I've seen no noteworthy micro stuttering or frame rate fixes to the game. But, I am just one test subject, so take my results with a grain of salt. My system might not benefit from the optimizations Respawn has added to the game.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • kerberos_20
    As promised, the team behind Jedi: Survivor has released a new patch for the game, addressing several bugs and performance problems related to the PC version. Some of these issues include performance problems for non-raytraced graphics modes, game crashes, and bugs tied to VFTX, AI, cinematics, and more. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles will get these same fixes tomorrow.
    umm no, pc patch got only performance improvements for non ray traced rendering, nothing else, altough i saw no diff...every other fixes are for ps/xbox
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    The patch rather  increased the crashes for me, not decreased them... went from 0 crashes to about 20 in one evening. What a failure...
    Reply
  • Other bugs worth mentioning include crashes tied to skipping cinematics, issues surrounding cloth physics, collision issues, AI issues, VFX issues, and a critical issue fixed where you could get stuck inside the Chamber of Duality if you didn't save after leaving the chamber and died.

    Those are for the consoles, not the PC platform. And these known issues on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are going to get a patch on MAY 2nd, 2023. I don't think these issues listed for consoles have already been resolved on the PC platform, assuming the PC platform also had these same issues like consoles.

    Because this is the first patch for the PC version. They don't mention any other fixes.

    According to the release notes, this first update only aims to improve the game’s performance when not using its Ray Tracing effects on the PC. And… well… that’s it. This first update does not bring any other improvements, tweaks, changes or fixes.

    Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Patch Notes PC - May 1st
    Performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering
    Reply
  • JTWrenn
    As long as customers do not complain and attempt to return and then not buy games from devs on day one that do this stuff....they will keep doing this stuff.

    EA especially is known for this stuff, and nobody should buy a game from them day one anymore....especially when reviewers are saying there are issues.
    Reply
  • kerberos_20
    KyaraM said:
    The patch rather  increased the crashes for me, not decreased them... went from 0 crashes to about 20 in one evening. What a failure...
    reinstall GPU drivers
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    kerberos_20 said:
    reinstall GPU drivers
    Yeah, will try that this afternoon. Didn't have a mind to do that last night. Never had issues like that with any game so far and everything else works without a hitch, too.
    Reply
  • kerberos_20
    KyaraM said:
    Yeah, will try that this afternoon. Didn't have a mind to do that last night. Never had issues like that with any game so far and everything else works without a hitch, too.
    ea forums mentions nahimic service is also causing access violation errors
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    kerberos_20 said:
    ea forums mentions nahimic service is also causing access violation errors
    Mh, okay, I'm not familiar with that. I think it did throw me d3d and DX-something issues, though. Thinking about it, the GPU driver sounds more and more likely. Will post an update when I'm off work.
    Reply
  • randomizer
    This is a bit like Batman: Arkham Knight all over again, except WB pulled that game from stores.
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    randomizer said:
    This is a bit like Batman: Arkham Knight all over again, except WB pulled that game from stores.
    I think you can replace Batman: Arkham Knight with any game released recently, and especially this year, to be honest. They all had major performance issues. It's a very annoying and bad pattern that needs to stop. None of those were pulled, either...
    Reply