Respawn Entertainment, the developer of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, has finally released a current-gen-only sequel to the beloved game Jedi: Fallen Order on PS5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC. Fans of Star Wars games will be excited to hear about the quality of the lighting, shadows, and animation in the new game. However, much of the excitement is focused on the significant inclusion of meaningful ray tracing on both console and PC platforms. This includes RT reflections and global illumination, which creates a truly immersive and realistic gaming experience.
The use of ray tracing in the game is no small achievement, but it does come with a cost, as it can create performance issues in RT-heavy areas of the game. The opening city area is a notable example, where the frame rate drops to around 45fps in the 60fps performance mode. Additionally, the resolution targets have been reduced compared to Jedi: Fallen Order to achieve the new, high-quality features. Interestingly, there are only a few distinguishable differences between the 30fps and 60fps modes, with the areas looking more similar than one might expect when swapping between the two. While the 30fps resolution mode offers more consistent performance, the 60fps performance mode struggles, particularly in the first city area where frame rates drop to the 30s, which is accompanied by screen tearing in the top third of the display whenever frame drops occur. This makes it a tough sell.
Despite these issues, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor provides a stunning core visual-feature set that makes the gaming experience immersive and captivating. The game has a massive 150GB install and features a brilliantly presented mix of cutscenes, open exploration, and challenging combat within a sprawling world design. Subtle lighting detail is present on the higher-end console platforms, which renders shaded areas and colours them by tracing the path of light as it bounces from its source and off nearby geometry.
Ultimately, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a fascinating release that offers a great gaming experience beyond the issues. The game needs some optimization and quality-of-life fixes, but the promise of its visuals guarantees much of the appeal. Respawn has pledged several patches in the works across the next few weeks to fix the current issues. We still have to wait and see how the Series X and S version, given the PC’s litany of issues, will fare, but it’s clear that they need to work on optimizing the game.
Digital Foundry is known for providing technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, and they used state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software in their analysis of the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game. They’ve created multi-gigabyte files that offer high-quality video playback for offline viewing. Digital Foundry charges a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50 to enjoy unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of their content. They believe it’s a small price to pay for an excellent gaming experience.
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The material in this article is written on the basis of another article.
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