Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has received a big update with patch nine, promising improved performance, reduced hitching and presumably a significantly better experience on PC. Does this mean that the game’s long-standing performance issues are finally solved, or are its fundamental challenges too great? We’ve tested the game on a range of hardware to find out and while there are some genuine performance improvements, fundamental problems we’ve discussed many times now are still highly problematic.
One annoying bug certainly seems to have been fixed, however. Shader compilation issues are much improved. The 30-second shader burn now only appears when a new game update or graphics driver is installed, rather than every time you launch the game. This step feels a bit longer too, which suggests it may be capturing more shaders than it did in earlier versions of the game – which could translate into reduced #StutterStruggle.
Unfortunately, while this bug looks to have been fixed, others remain. For example, I discovered the game ran much more slowly after the patch because DLSS performance mode wasn’t active despite being selected. Changing between different DLSS modes didn’t fix the issue, but restarting the game did. Similarly, each time the camera turns in some areas, there are big flashes of culled geometry with a grey or white background behind them manifesting for a few frames, giving the game an unstable look.
As well as issues that have persisted in the game since launch, new bugs have also been introduced – including the game setting the wrong field of view after a cutscene ends, resulting in a zoomed-out presentation. It’s a shame to see the game feel this buggy more than a year after release and after this ninth major patch.