Terrible Performance

The standard response to performance issues is to run the game at a lower resolution or preset. For me, the issues remain at 720p resolution with FSR2 Ultra Performance, and the lowest Graphics Preset. When I am having issues, the graphics setting has no impact on performance. 

The #1 area I have been having performance issues is with A.I. population. The denser the population, the more unstable the frame rate. Gamer's Nexus has a review of Dragon's Dogma 2 which quantifies the negative effect A.I. population has on CPU performance, which seems to affect numerous 9th Generation releases. Jedi: Survivor does not have a native Apple M3 port to see if performance is better than existing x86 CPUs. 

Next, is a bug with the Holomap, which persists into Patch 8. At various times when opening the holomap, either the planet local map, or the galaxy navigation map will have single digit frame rates. This does not seem to affect the other holomap, and so might be a glitch.

There also seems to be memory leaks in the game. Users are reporting crashing when Windows has to extend the System Page File to accommodate excessive VRAM usage. A memory leak may be related to a commonly reported crash when disabling upscaling (FSR/DLSS), since higher resolutions require more VRAM. Memory Leaks are known to cause performance issues when requiring swapping or paging to disk. 

Epic Games has reported stability issues with regards to Intel CPUs, which might involve bad default settings from motherboard suppliers. Lesser stability issues with CPU and memory clocks might be an item of suspicioning regarding performance on PCI-Express Gen 4/DDR5 systems, however the Ryzen 7 2700X is a PCI-Express Gen 3/DDR4 system, and I don't expect it supports XMP overclocking, nor would I expect an AMD CPU to be a misconfigured Intel platform. 

Users may also report frame drops when entering some cutscenes. DLSS Frame Gen gets reset and thus stops working when entering cutscenes and requires time to reinitiate, as it does whenever the frame rate becomes unstable. This means that DLSS Frame Gen is failing at its one requested task which is to maintain a smooth enough 30 FPS minimum frame rate, and a locked 60 FPS minimum if possible. Traversal stutter, lingering shader compilation triggers, the holomap bug, memory leaks, and A.I. population density can also cause DLSS Frame Gen to fail.

Some users have reported issues with regular "Game Ready" NVIDIA driver updates, and have switched to using "Studio" drivers for improved stability. It isn't clear if this improves or affects frame rate. 

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700X has a base clock of 3.7GHz, which exceeds the 3.5GHz clock of the PlayStation 5, and the Ryzen 7 2700X has a Turbo up to 4.3GHz. The 8-Core/16-Thread CPU exceeds the 6-Cores made available to games on the PlayStation 5. Given these specifications, the Ryzen 7 2700X would be expected to be able to maintain a stable frame rate without thermal throttling. As the game does not lock the frame rate to 30 FPS, nor provide the ability as with Fallen Order, the expectation is that the frame rate would be stable at a minimum 60 FPS. 

The Operating System was not provided, but Public Relations for Electronic Arts and Respawn has blamed both Windows 10 and Windows 11 for performance issues, as well as CPUs that are too weak and too powerful. MacOS is obviously not supported. There is no expectation that Linux or Proton would have better support than Windows 10 or Windows 11. (See the "@EAStarWars" account on Twitter/X and the post from 4/28/2023). PCWorld goes with the headline of "kinda sorta apologizes", and reports that "are detecting an accusatory tone" from that P.R. statement. Epic Games followed up with an additional statement blaming Intel, in February of 2024, which again reeks of "accusatory tones" towards consumers of Unreal Engine games. It has since been reported that Electronic Arts is going to cease publishing licensed content (e.g. Star Wars), and that they have laid off or otherwise lost a significant portion of the Respawn development staff behind Fallen Order and Survivor.