Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the worst triple-A PC port of 2023 so far

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor launched yesterday on PC and at this point in time, it's a technical failure on just about every level. This is somewhat hard to believe as all of the issues Fallen Order possessed return for the sequel, despite their staggeringly obvious nature. Shader compilation stutter and traversal stutter are back, while the in-game options offer no recourse in addressing the game's key issues. In terms of polish, performance and accessibility, this is actually far worse than Fallen Order, perhaps taking the cake as the worst triple-A PC port of 2023, despite some remarkably strong competition.

The game's initial handshake with the player fails completely in improving over its predecessor. The options are barebone UE4 standards, right down to their naming. There's zero context given to the user as to what the performance and visual ramifications are for each setting, leaving the player with no hints as to how to improve the experience for their specific hardware. There's also a litany of issues that get in the way of you figuring out whether options improve performance at all: for example, toggling ray tracing from on to off then back on again can make the game run worse than it initially did with RT on. The only way to fix it is a full game restart after which performance returns to the level it was at earlier.

There are issues with other options as well. For example, you only have access to TAA and FSR2 – and FSR2 is just not a good option for acceptable image quality. Essentially, whenever an object or the camera moves, FSR2 causes a blurred pixelisation effect at all quality levels. This applies to the entire image and all aspects of it, giving the game a motion blurred, ghost-like look - even if you turn motion blur off. Unreal Engine 4 has excellent DLSS and XeSS plug-in support. The developers have chosen to ignore them in a world where each provides improved quality for Nvidia and Intel GPU owners respectively - and that's unacceptable.

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