Jedi Survivor Receives First Patch Addressing Performance Issues

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.

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.