Digital Foundry
Digital Foundry’s analysis of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is here, and man, it is one of their most brutal reviews in recent memory. While Respawn has acknowledged the game running poorly on PC, citing things like powerful GPUs mismatched with lower-spec CPUs, that seems to be masking much, much larger problems.
The gist of the video is that there is essentially no way to fully fix Jedi: Survivor on PC right now. Not with any specific settings, not with any spec machine. You can be running the game on low setting with the best graphics card on the market, and you will still be running into hitching and frame drop problems periodically, in addition to things like texture.
One issue is that for whatever reason, Jedi: Survivor is barely using the GPU power of most machines, resulting in lower performance, and there seem to be baked-in issues that span all settings and systems that are essentially impossible to fix on the players’ end.
Digital Foundry’s conclusion here is a rare one: The call this the worst PC port of 2023 so far, where we just had an awful PC port with The Last of Us Remaster, and several others before that. They actually say that the current PC version of Jedi: Survivor “should not be sold” in its current state, which is something I can’t remember Digital Foundry saying before. Not even in the Cyberpunk launch era, where that game actually ran better on PC than consoles at launch. Here, the opposite is true.
But while Digital Foundry is focused on PC, and the game is better on consoles, it’s still often not great there, either, with players complaining about performance issues on PlayStation and Xbox as well. We have already had one major launch patch for Jedi: Survivor, but as Respawn said in their message, the PC problems especially are complicated and will take time to test. The general consensus appears to be to wait for the PC version to be patched a few more times to fix many of these issues, as you’ll have a rough playthrough otherwise. Or you may just want to play it on console, the platform the game was clearly designed for, which you can tell immediately by the awkward menu navigation with mouse and keyboard.
It really is a shame that Jedi: Survivor is undergoing these issues because the general consensus is that the game itself, gameplay and story, is phenomenal once you actually get into it. But if you want to play on PC, this is just not how you should experience the game, and while I certainly don’t expect Respawn to stop selling it there, they do clearly have a done of work to do, and it should not have released in this state. No real excuse for that.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read More
Digital Foundry, the leading authority on digital hardware analysis, recently assessed the PC version of the upcoming action-adventure game, Jedi: Fallen Order and has delivered a damning analysis.
The game, developed by Electronic Arts division Respawn Entertainment for consoles and PC release, was characterised by Digital Foundry as “unplayable in its current state”, citing “a comprehensive range of major issues” relating to frame rate, resolution and technical consistency.
The most damning conclusion, however, was that—in its current state—the PC version of the game should not be sold.
The Frame Rate situation was described as “the biggest problem”, with Digital Foundry citing frame rate drops of up to 50 percent in 4K resolutions and only minor improvements at 1440p resolution. In addition, the game regular stuttered “even during cutscenes”, often freezing during the display of simple 2D art on the user’s screen.
While 1440p resolution provides an ‘improved yet still inconsistent’ level of performance, according to Digital Foundry’s analyst, most users would be better served by playing at 1080p resolution as a ‘trade-off in image quality for a much more consistent frame rate performance’.
That isn’t even addressing the game’s problems with texture pop-in, terrain load times and other issues that don’t spell good news for users hoping for the best from a PC version of what has the potential to be an excellent game.
A subsequent report from the site PowerUp Gaming confirmed Digital Foundry’s assessment, noting that the general performance was poor and that PC was “the wrong choice” for the game’s release.
With this kind of consensus of opinion, it’s clear that Respawn Entertainment could have done much better at developing the PC version of Jedi: Fallen Order, and the onus is clearly on the company to address these issues before releasing it in its current form.
