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Not even Nvidia’s RTX 4090 can handle Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is overkill for a vast majority of games, but it seems to have met its match in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. That’s right — even the best graphics card struggles to maintain more than 35 frames per second (fps) in EA’s upcoming title.

Of course, this kind of performance is unintended, and it stems entirely from poor optimization. Will your computer be able to handle the game when it launches tomorrow?

Cal holding his lightsaber with BD-1 on his shoulder.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is just a day away from its official launch date, but it seems that EA’s efforts are far from over. Several reports from early players and reviewers indicate that the game is terribly optimized right now, with issues like low frame rates and insane VRAM usage plaguing those who already got to play it.

Many games launch well before they’re optimized — looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077 — but the problems that affect Jedi: Survivor seem bad enough to almost render it unplayable. There currently doesn’t seem to be a graphics card that can offer steady 60 fps, and that should never be the case when overpriced beasts like the RTX 4090 exist.

EckhartsLadder on YouTube tried to run the game on a computer equipped with an RTX 3080 Ti. While a last-gen card, the RTX 3080 Ti is a high-end offering that should still be able to handle the most demanding games being released today. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for Jedi: Survivor — the YouTuber found that the frame rates maxed out at around 50 fps. It’s worth noting that even tweaking the settings did nothing to elevate those numbers. The game also had its fair share of other issues, such as audio problems and cutscenes that didn’t work.

GameStar, another YouTuber, also battled similar problems — but his computer is even more high-end. A rig equipped with an RTX 4090, 32GB of RAM, and a Ryzen 9 5900X couldn’t handle running Jedi: Survivor at 1440p. Let’s not forget that playing anything at 1440p is a waste with an RTX 4090 — that card was made for 4K. Still, at a lower resolution, it averaged around 35 to 45 fps with rare moments of hitting 60 fps in some areas.

In its current state, Jedi: Survivor is a massive VRAM hog. It uses up to 21GB of VRAM while only utilizing about 50% of the card’s total power. All in all, this doesn’t sound like an AAA game that’s ready to launch.

Cal’s newest journey in a galaxy far, far away has begun and we’re excited for you to experience it!

Our first patch will arrive on launch day across all platforms. In the weeks ahead, we’ll deploy patches that will:

– Fix bugs
– Improve performance
– Add more accessibility… pic.twitter.com/pUtyoGopP5

— EA Star Wars (@EAStarWars) April 26, 2023

Fortunately, it seems that everyone involved is trying to fix these problems before more people get access to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. EA is promising that a launch day patch is coming soon, with optimizations and bug fixes awaiting. Pre-release patches are also being released regularly. On the driver side, Nvidia has recently rolled out a new Game Ready Driver that zones in on Jedi: Survivor with some game-specific optimizations.

Will all of these efforts turn out to be enough when the game is available to the general public? Let’s hope so because as things stand now, it might score some poor early reviews if the performance doesn’t improve.

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Monica J. White
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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