Respawn Issues Apology for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor PC Performance Woes

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was released on April 28 across PC and current-gen consoles, with the former version getting bombarded with negative reviews on Steam on launch day. The reviews on Steam focus on the game’s poor performance on PC, causing choppy framerates even during less-populated interior segments (Gadgets 360 can confirm performance issues on PC). While the day-one patch made things like cutscenes smoother, as per several players, Jedi Survivor was still unable to maintain a consistent 60 fps, even on the lowest settings. Developer Respawn Entertainment has now issued an apology, confirming that its team will continue monitoring performance “across all platforms” and release patches in time. For the record, the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X versions aren’t devoid of performance issues either — just nowhere on par with the PC version.

“We are aware that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn’t performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players, in particular those with high-end machines or certain specific configurations,” the tweet reads. “For example, players using cutting-edge, multi-threaded chipsets designed for Windows 11 were encountering problems on Windows 10, or high-end GPUs coupled with lower-performing CPUs also saw unexpected frame loss.” While the response is certainly backed by an apology, it feels a little accusatory — as if it has to do with how a player has configured their setup. This is compounded by the fact that the game was originally slated for a March 17 release and was then delayed by six weeks to ensure polish at launch.

Respawn Entertainment will now divert focus towards fixing the issues, but note that it will take some time for ‘significant testing,’ so the updates don’t introduce new problems. It is also odd how the developer deemed running Windows 10 on newer CPUs as the cause for the issue — to my knowledge, there isn’t a significant downside to it. Plus, a quick perusal of Steam’s Hardware Survey page will show that 73.95 percent of PC players still use Windows 10 as their primary operating system. The game’s DRM has also been reportedly posing issues for PC players, locking players out of the game because the technology believes that the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor app had been open on multiple systems at once. Even the PS5 version is laggy and its HDR system completely destroys the image quality — to the point where things are cast entirely in black.

A more recent example of a broken PC port is The Last of Us Part I, which also opened to negative reception on Steam, due to crashes, choppy framerates, and odd overconsumption of the VRAM. Since launch, developer Naughty Dog has released a host of new patches and hotfixes, which have seemingly improved the performance a lot. Let’s see how long Respawn takes to dole out their fixes.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.