Good news! With the latest Star Wars Jedi: Survivor patch, the game is finally achieving a near-consistent 60fps throughout all its action and exploration, translating to a much smoother experience. However, to achieve this some visual cuts were made, and that has added some quirks that might be distracting for some players.
Even before the recent patches, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was a fantastic game and one of my favorites of 2023. Respawn’s sequel to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order expanded on that original game with more planets, lightsabers, enemies, and abilities. It also continued the story of Jedi Cal Kestis as he and his ragtag group fought back the Empire and looked for a place to escape all the violence in the galaxy. Still, as great as Survivor was, the game’s performance was a bit all over the place, especially in its large hub world and during intense fights. Patch 7 seems to fix that by removing ray-traced visual features.
As covered extensively in a new video from Digital Foundry, Jedi Survivor’s latest patch includes big improvements to the game’s performance mode, which is supposed to offer up a higher framerate at the cost of some visual fidelity. As mentioned at the start, the good news is that Patch 7 succeeds, and Jedi: Survivor now runs at a nearly locked 60fps, even in previously troublesome areas. This is fantastic, as it makes it look and feel smoother, which helps a lot in a fast-paced action game like Survivor
But as also pointed out in the video, Respawn achieved this improved performance by removing ray-traced reflections from Performance mode. Now, on the one hand, this trade-off seems fine as RT lighting and reflections are still in the game, but now only in the game’s Quality mode which runs at 30fps.
Yet, the problem is that some areas of the game without ray-traced lighting look darker than before. Worse, the removal of RT reflections means some areas with shiny floors or water now feature some hard-to-ignore artifacts from the game’s use of screen space reflections.
Personally, I agree with Digital Foundry’s suggestion that Respawn, in a future patch, should turn off SSR on water, as the artifacts are the worst here and it would likely look better without it on at all.
But even with some of these new visual quirks, I’m happy Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s performance mode is now running at 60fps most of the time. I think the visual trade-offs here make sense. And these improvements and tweaks might be a glimpse at how the next-gen game will look when it arrives on PS4 and Xbox One in the future.
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