As you probably know by now, the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (opens in new tab) has not launched in the best of conditions, with many players reporting choppy performance in Respawn’s latest Star Wars adventure. Publisher EA has already issued a sort-of apology (opens in new tab) for the problems, and has promised more patches coming in the next few weeks.
One of those patches had landed today, which apparently provides “Performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering.” That’s literally all the patchnotes say, though. There’s no specific information about what’s been fixed, or what’s been causing all the problems in the first place. But this is the second update EA has released in the space of a few days, and Morgan reported that the first patch alleviated some of the issues (opens in new tab) he experienced while reviewing it, so let’s hope this second patch further smooths things out.
Today a patch has become available for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and tomorrow (5/2) we’ll also be issuing a patch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.We are hard at work on patches that will further improve performance and fix bugs across all platforms.… pic.twitter.com/XrjbdDQUp6May 1, 2023
The announcement also addresses a bunch of bugfixes coming to consoles tomorrow, but as EA point out, the PC has already had those. It doesn’t make any mention of other issues with the PC version that have been raised, such as the terrible implementation of AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling, and whether there’s any chance of getting some DLSS action up in here.
Chances are Respawn and EA have further improvements coming in the next few weeks. But it would have been better if all this could have been avoided, especially since the game underneath it all is genuinely very good. This isn’t a Cyberpunk situation, where the flaws stretch beyond the technical and into the core game design. For what it’s worth, the Steam reviews have improved (opens in new tab) from “Mostly Negative” to “Mixed”, which suggests things are a little better than they were before the weekend.
Perhaps the problems would smart less if Survivor wasn’t the latest in a spate of rough PC ports, including the technical mess (opens in new tab) that was Forspoken, and the outright disaster (opens in new tab) that was the PC version of the Last of Us. It’s difficult to pin down what exactly the industry’s problem is with the PC at the moment, but there certainly seems to be something troublesome in the water.