There’s no question about the sheer quality of craftsmanship on show in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but much as was the case with its predecessor, the game suffered on PC due to shoddy performance and excessive stuttering. Survivor‘s latest performance update sadly fails to resolve this problem.
To be perfectly clear, now, Jedi: Survivor‘s Update 9 is a proper game-changer if you’d excuse the pun. We’re seeing a substantial increase in the game’s frame rate basically across the board as well as losing the much-maligned Denuvo anti-tamper. Yet, thorough testing conducted by Overclock3D and my own personal experience show that Respawn has failed to resolve Jedi: Survivor‘s traversal stutter. To that end, the stutter-struggle sadly continues, and I’ve got little hope that it’s going to be fixed anytime soon, if ever.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s traversal stutter is still a big problem, and it’s likely to stay that way
Specifically, I’m talking about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor‘s recent Update 9. Update 9 is, for the most part, a real slam dunk for this technically flawed but otherwise incredible game. Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of Star Wars at all, so it’s a testament to Respawn’s fine work on Jedi titles that even someone such as myself would play and enjoy them. As good as they are on the gameplay side of things, however, these games are extremely poor performers whose excessive stuttering is going to annoy those that are sensitive to frametime spikes and performance problems.
The obvious hope, then, was that Update 9 would finally bring Jedi: Survivor to a level of polish and performance that befits such a premium title. Not the case, however. Respawn did manage to (seemingly) resolve the unusably crash-prone ray-tracing features, granted. The team also substantially improved Jedi: Survivor‘s performance, which may or may not have something to do with Denuvo itself. These are, certainly, huge and praiseworthy wins for Jedi: Survivor, but the game’s arguably biggest and most pervasive problem is the traversal stutter that you literally cannot resolve no matter what. And that, sadly, is still present.
To be sure, traversal stutter is way less prominent and annoying than it’s been before, but the fact that it’s still around does not give me hope that Respawn is even capable of fixing it. This sounds damning, but it’s actually not, because Jedi: Fallen Order never was fixed. I can vouch for this fact myself, actually, as I tried playing Fallen Order late last year only to experience some of the worst shader compilation and traversal stuttering I had ever seen in a modern game. And, sure, shader stutters do eventually go away, bu traversal does not, and Survivor is in a state that reminds me quite a lot of its predecessor.
For those who find these problems too egregious not to deal with them, Fallen Order can be patched up to an extent by using the DXVK Vulkan Async tweak. I’ve got no such advice to share about Survivor, sadly, but if you’re on Nvidia, I do recommend taking this Redditor’s advice and properly updating the game’s frame generation plugin to resolve excessive artifacting. Why wasn’t this updated? I’m not sure, honestly, but much as is the case with the ongoing stutter-struggle, I do think we won’t ever hear much about it from Respawn itself.
Published: Sep 16, 2024 09:24 am