RT is gone, performance improves - but some issues remain.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is arguably one of the most visually impressive console games this generation. Marrying extremely high-quality assets with excellent lighting and filmic post-processing, it’s easily the best that Star Wars has looked in the realm of real-time rendering - but the game was let down by a few key faults. The good news is that the recently released patch addresses a lot of our concerns and the performance mode is much improved. The PC version? We’ll be looking at that separately, but while the addition of DLSS and frame generation is great, there are still foundational problems with that port.
Returning to the console builds, we noted a lot of issues with the PS5 and Xbox Series renditions of the game, even though it had much to commend it. Image quality was questionable, especially in the 60fps performance mode on PS5 and Series X, and the game suffered from numerous bugs, some of them limiting game progress. Frame-rates also weren’t ideal, often rolling around in the 40-60fps range in more demanding sections during performance mode play. Numerous patches have come and gone and the bugs have mostly been ironed out, but the game’s rendering issues have remained. Until now.
I hope other devs chill out with ray tracing, especially with unreal engine. We’ve seen very rare implementations of it on current consoles that actually are desirable (Metro Exodus, Spider-Man/R&C, Doom Eternal) and all are on bespoke engines that don’t upscale from sub 1080p (maybe not Metro Exodus).