Respawn’s highly anticipated new Star Wars game is the latest shit show of a port to be released in an unfit state for PC.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to the much-liked Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order released in 2019, is currently beset with many performance problems bound to infuriate already frustrated PC players.
According to Digital Foundry, the game is currently: “Plagued with shader compilation stutter, traversal stutter, nonsensical CPU limitations, an impenetrable settings menu with little utility, a terrible FSR2 implementation, no DLSS or XeSS… virtually everything that could go wrong with a PC port is present and correct in this awful release.”
Gamers equipped with top-level PC tech will struggle to get acceptable frame rates, as DF’s test rig only managed between 50-60fps on a 12900K/RTX 4090 system running at 4K with FSR2 performance mode and RT enabled. A system packing that kind of heat should not struggle to that extent, especially with FSR turned on.
To make matters worse, the game does little to help with its graphics options, as there are no descriptions to help gamers decide which settings to tweak or the performance implications.
CPU utilisation appears to be a particular weak point, the same problem that plagued the PC port of Gotham Knights when it launched earlier this year. It’s a bizarre limitation that artificially caps potential CPU performance, regardless of the brand or age of the silicon.
The most jarring issue may be the all-too-familiar compilation stutter that seems to afflict most recent PC ports, leading to massive stutters and slowdowns whenever a player crosses an invisible threshold into a new area. Despite the game going through a shader compilation cycle on launch, stutter remains on every playthrough. A totally unacceptable situation.
As expected, EA and Respawn have offered meek apologies with the promise of incoming patches. But given this is yet another game to be released for PC in an unfit state, gamers will rightly demand that publishers stop throwing unfinished versions of games into the marketplace, only to fix them (sometimes only partially) at a later date.
With PC sales struggling in 2023, the last thing studios need is for potential customers to abandon the platform altogether in fear of wasting more money on awful fucking products.
