“The Last of Us Part I and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor PC Ports Face Optimization Issues”

PC gamers have definitely not been having a good time in recent months. With exceptions such as Resident Evil 4 or Returnal, computer ports of new games are not exactly successful. One of the best examples in this regard is undoubtedly The Last of Us Part I, which suffered from a number of problems and the developers still have to fix them a month after its release. However, it looks like the game has some competition, and some serious competition at that. The adventure Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (our review here), which comes out already on Friday, is even worse than we thought.

On Wednesday, the review embargo was lifted, and those who played the title on PC were able to share their not-so-positive impressions. He traditionally summarized several sources in his video Daniel Owen. For example, a German magazine took care of the video demonstration GameStar, who had a computer with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, and 32 GB of RAM, running the game at 1440p. It should have been relatively trouble-free for such a setup, but it wasn’t. For one thing, it turned out that the game uses a truly incredible amount of video memory. It was already the subject of complaints at TLOU, but here the situation is much worse. In 1440p, the game easily took up 18 GB of the total 24 that the RTX 4090 has in open locations. Even worse is the utilization of the graphics card itself, which is easily below 50%, which means only one thing – a huge CPU bottleneck. Because of this, the title only reaches around 45 frames per second.

That VRAM is a problem is also indicated by a fairly detailed analysis within the review of a Latin American magazine with a characteristic name PC Master Race. According to their findings, the game on Ryzen 9 5950X, RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB VRAM) and 16 GB RAM was practically unplayable in 4K due to the 12 GB VRAM capacity, which was simply not enough and caused major stuttering. After testing the RTX 3070 (8 GB VRAM), the editors discovered that you can’t even play at the highest settings in Full HD, problems with the video memory even persisted even with the High and Medium presets.

However, if you already have sufficient VRAM capacity, the game will still not run ideally due to the limitation of the processor, and increasing the FPS is quite difficult, as evidenced by the magazine’s observations PC Gamer, who tested the game on an i9-9900KS, RTX 2080 Super and 32GB of RAM. In more open locations, the game only reached about 35 frames per second. The only upscaling option here is FSR 2, which is said to cause a blurry image and not to help FPS at all. The reason is the already mentioned CPU bottleneck, as upscaling only helps in cases where the graphics card is the brake. The only way out here would be image generation, but DLSS is not in the game at all and the competition in the form of FSR 3 still hasn’t been released. PC Gamer also complains about traversal stuttering when passing through doors or huge FPS drops in cutscenes.

Twitter user James Galizio again pointing out on the big difference between graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, for which the game was apparently optimized primarily. While on the RTX 4090 it ran in 1440p without Ray Tracing at 46 FPS with only 36% utilization of the graphics chip, the less powerful RX 7900 XTX in 4K with Ray Tracing reached 58 FPS in the same location and the utilization was at 83%. In other words, AMD graphics can be used much better in this game and are not as demanding on the CPU.

Andy’s performance (1440p, no RT) vs my performance (4K, RT) pic.twitter.com/iVb4TZ2GMd

— James Galizio (@Theswweet) April 26, 2023

Of course, it’s possible that the day one patch will fix some of the issues, but for now it looks like the developers at Respawn have a lot of work ahead of them. In short, the optimization on PC is very bad, and if you were planning to buy the game on this platform, you should probably wait a little longer.