Jedi: Survivor Receives Its Second Optimization Update

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is getting a new patch to address a host of issues with the game's performance. Most notably, the new patch is addressing Jedi: Survivor's notorious traversal hitching issues and improving its ray tracing performance. The patch should already be out for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, with the PC version coming "as soon as possible this week."

When Jedi: Survivor launched last month, the game received severe criticism for its performance issues on the PC port. These issues affected even the highest-end PC hardware configurations. The issues were so bad that EA released a public apology on Twitter on launch day, promising the game would get fixed through an ongoing process of patches.

EA was quick to fulfill its promise and the first patch was released just a few days after Jedi: Survivor launched. It addressed a lot of the game-breaking performance issues and significantly improved performance on most systems. We saw these improvements firsthand in our performance analysis of Jedi: Survivor, noting how the game ran decently well on mid-range and high-end GPU hardware. We even saw surprisingly good results with 8GB cards like the RTX 3070, which exhibited good performance results compared to AMD's higher-capacity RX 6000-series counterparts.

However, the first patch didn't fix everything, and the game is still plagued by a number of minor to moderate performance issues, along with some game-breaking bugs.

This is where this latest patch comes in, aiming to address more of these problems. One of the best improvements in the patch addresses the game's notorious traversal hitching problems, where frame rates could drop anytime Cal Kestis is running around the game world. Respawn is optimizing the game's streaming budgets to smooth out performance when new textures and assets are swapped into main memory and/or graphics memory.

The rest of the performance improvements include better ray-tracing performance thanks to updated occlusion behavior that reduces idle time stalls in the game, performance improvements for some of the visual effects, and improved non-raytracing performance when enabling or disabling the game's RT mode. Hopefully the improvements will take care of some of the rendering issues we noticed.

Sadly this second major update isn't close to fixing all the performance issues in Jedi: Survivor, but the developers have given us a glimpse of what the development team is working on right now, with three major performance fixes aimed at future patches for PC users. The first focuses on improving performance with Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake and 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs with efficiency cores. The second is a general improvement to CPU and GPU utilization while reducing idle time with RT enabled or disabled. Finally, the third involves further hitching improvements revolving around RT data streaming, asset streaming, and "a gap" in the game's prebuilt shaders.

For the rest of the bug fixes, be sure to check out the full EA report here.