Star Wars Jedi: Survivor officially released on April 27, and complaints about poor performance, stuttering, and excessive VRAM use appeared virtually seconds later. As an AMD-promoted game, and one that AMD has used to suggest cards with less than 16GB of VRAM aren't sufficient (which would include its own RX 6700- and 6600-series parts), we probably shouldn't be surprised. But patches and driver updates have landed that are supposed to fix some of the most egregious problems. To see how the game now runs, we've tested the PC patch 3.5 version on some of the best graphics cards.
First, let us rant for a moment about DRM. Like so many other EA games, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has some draconian limitations on what you can do with the game. We purchased the game on Steam... and then still had to install the EA launcher app to play it. This sucks, and the same goes for Ubi games or products from anyone else. If you're going to release the game on Steam, Epic, or other launchers, do the work to make it function fully within that environment!
Also fun: We borrowed a friend's account (Aaron's, if you're wondering), which was not the Steam version but was instead purchased on the EA launcher. We couldn't even install the game there because "another version of the game is already installed." So, backup the Steam version, uninstall, and then download the 133GB of data again. Nice. But that's still only part of the issue.
Our biggest complaint (about the DRM, not performance) is one that literally only affects people like us that benchmark games: It's tied to your PC hardware. Oh, you can run it on up to four "different" PCs, but after that you get locked out for 24 hours. Changing a graphics card counts as a different PC, the same goes for the CPU. The CPU is slightly more understandable, though really we'd prefer the DRM to link to the motherboard, as that's the true indicator of whether a different PC is being used. Regardless, even with two different accounts, we're only able to test on eight GPUs/CPUs/PCs per day. Well, except the DRM screwed up somehow and let us test on a ninth GPU at one point. Go figure.
Anyway, this is a look at how the 3.5 patch variant of the game runs on a high-end PC, using higher performance GPUs plus a few others, which we'll augment with additional testing as requested once we're able to get back into the game. #DRMSucks. All testing was done on May 2–3, and EA promises future patches that could further improve performance.
