Last Friday (28), Electronic Arts released the highly anticipated Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Unsurprisingly, the game had good reviews from expert critics, but was harshly rejected by PC players due to poor optimization on the platform, a trend that has been growing more and more over the last few years.
Although EA officially commented on the matter and promised fixes for the future, Digital Foundry analyzed the current state of the game and consecrated it as the worst port of a AAA game for the PC in 2023.
According to analysts at Digital Foundry, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor retains all the problems of Fallen Order, such as stuttering when compiling shaders and running through some scenarios, with performance and polish lower than the previous game. Digital Foundry also criticizes the lack of context given to the user when choosing settings, which makes it difficult to improve the state of the game.
Among bizarre problems like turning off ray tracing and turning the feature back on resulting in an unexplained worsening of the game’s performance, something resolved only by completely restarting the game, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has other problems such as the lack of support for DLSS and XeSS . The developers opted for FSR2, which reduces the sharpness of the image. However, there are worse things.
Stuttering in Fallen Order is back, which means constant moments of performance fluctuations, and can happen anywhere in the game, regardless of the user’s CPU and GPU combination. Even when playing at the lowest settings, you’ll encounter stuttering due to compiling shaders and running through scenarios.
Digital Foundry reveals that a Core i9 12900K combined with a 6400MT/s DDR5 and RTX 4090 can’t handle 60fps at the lowest possible settings available. If you increase the settings, things get even worse. With ray tracing enabled, CPU-friendly scenes are barely above 30fps on a 12900K.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor doesn’t take advantage of the hardware it’s running on, and issues from a 2019 game that were never fixed remain present in a 2023 AAA game.
Digital Foundry also says that despite the announcement of updates, it is unacceptable for the game to be released for PC in such a sorry state.
These are certainly very harsh criticisms, which must be absorbed not only by EA but also by all the major developers, who have been releasing increasingly poorly optimized games on the PC, leaving the platform far below the consoles, even for players who have state-of-the-art hardware.
