Star Wars: Jedi Survivor Director Stig Asmussen Is Leaving Electronic Arts - IGN I wonder if his early departure has to do with the poor technical state that Jedi Survivor launched in, since he had stated publicly that he wanted to do a trilogy? Either way, I wish him the best as despite the technical issues, the Jedi series have been among the best Star Wars games I've ever played and aptly demonstrated that single player Star Wars based titles could be commercial successes.
There is something wrong with his machines. His performance and amount of stutters is always much worse than with other reviewers and users.
The amount of performance Alex from Digital Foundry is getting in games is irrelevant in my opinion because the point is that he picks up on and reports issues with stuttering that would otherwise never get reported by other media or YouTube sites. Stuttering, especially of the shader compilation kind, is something everyone will have because you cannot just brute force your way through the issue even with the most high-end and expensive hardware. Maybe in ten or twenty years time you might be able to but certainly not right now. Digital Foundry are the reason this issue is so well-known among the PC community (#StutterStruggle) and why developers even bother to fix their games in the first place (not just stuttering but other issues to that they pick up on). I honestly dread to think what the state of PC gaming would be like without Digital Foundry. I mean it has been awful in 2023 with so many half-broken PC versions released but unless sites like Digital Foundry cover it then it would just stay that way. Most publishers see PC gamers as third-class citizens and prioritise consoles first (even though they often release with issues too). Regardless of what hardware you have Jedi Survivor is still not running as well as it should be for a triple A game five months after launch. And that honestly is shockingly poor even for EA who published it. Not sure what is going through the minds of the developers and publishers when they release a game in this state and that read the feedback and reviews that point out poor optimisations. Are they honestly proud of their work or is it a publisher decision where they decide it has sold X number of copies and made Y amount of profit so why bother wasting money on the game further for diminishing returns? Respawn, unfortunately, have this tarnished reputation now which is a shame because I do wonder just how much they are to blame versus EA who also have a poor reputation as well for post-game support (well for anything that isn't called 'FIFA' or 'Sims').
Probably something to do with the elaborate setup to capture high res video and FPS/frametimes? he could have set the hardware polling rate to 100ms instead of 1000ms like normal users
It has to be something bigger than that to explain the diference in performance and the stutters he gets. For example, to go from 70ns to 90ns on memory latency, it would require either that the memory is running at very low speeds or that some heavy applications are running in the background.
It is curious that DF did not mention the broken DLSS Super Resolution in this game. Turning it on or off does not change the result, and the same happens when changing from quality to performance. Same frame rate, same gpu usage. It looks fake! Several reports have already been opened on Steam about this and many sites are talking about it but apparently DF didn't catch this. Yet the addition of DLSS was the focus of this patch! Better talk about the skip frame of the run animation right? (something I really can't perceive even now that I know). And what about the ghosting that generates the frame gen with the .dll in the update? It is solved by using version 1.0.0.7 but DF didn't say or even notice it. I'm beginning to think that the #StutterStruggle thanks to Alex has completely taken over the scene but leaving everything else out the door. In any case, this is largely less noticeable with the latest patch, despite the video saying the exact opposite.
DLSS works fine with patch 7.0, but you have to restart the game most of the time after changing the setting to actually take. Also, the best results are using the Frame Generation nvngx_dlssg.dll v1.0.7.0 from The Witcher 3 (Frame Generation is broken especially with HDR otherwise) and DLSS nvngx_dlss.dll v3.5.0.0 (v2) which appears to reduce stuttering quite a bit. It's also a good idea to use DLSSTweaks to force either DLSS preset C or F and/or DLAA (if your PC is strong enough). Forcing ReBar via Nvidia Profile Inspector appears to help with patch 7.0 of the game too.
Well, its EA all over, they do not care as long as they make money. I'm sure the higher ups would rather they completely focused on their sports brands and games like apex legends. These side projects do not seem to get the right amount of support and devs in turn are likely under pressure to release to a deadline hence the botched releases of Battlefield and Jedi Survivor (you could argue dead space remake too). I'm sure the director leaving when he was supposed to be on board for a trilogy tells us all is not well behind the scenes.
Remember that time when Alex admitted he was running his GPU at PCIE x4 speed rather than x16 because he had it installed in a wrong slot like a total noob? I forgot exact details, but it was something like that. I almost fell off my chair when I heard that. This is inexcusable mistake from someone like DF who pretend they are this big authority in game benchmarking. Also there was time period when they kept gaslighting everyone into believing that Elden Ring was a stuttering nightmare, but I had like couple of stutters on day 1 and never again in 300 hours of play time lol. So yeah, DF makes a ton of mistakes.
Unfortunately, DF has also a lot of ratings, with a result their bullshit has become a kind of truth for many people out there.
That Eldern Ring video really annoyed me lol. I think I had a couple of stutters that counted for a few minutes in a game that took me 160h. Performance was a locked 60 99% of the time at max setting 4k. Definitely gas lighting going on in that video. I'm not doubting some had issues with the game but for a game that size it was perfect on my rig. I actually think the stutters people were having were due to usb devices triggering anti cheat and I know the Xbox controller had a firmware update that fixed polling problems.
DF do a pretty decent job looking at stuff not everyone really does allot of articles or videos on. But I think people, myself included, often give them WAY more credit than they really deserve. And because of that we tend to really hit on em when they make mistakes, poor analysis, silly claims or don't disclose information properly. In the end they are just a bunch of dudes on YT doing some generally good analysis and presenting their opinions on subjects. As such, we shouldn't really be considering them any more a definitive information source than anyone else on YT.
Even Rich who i respect the most at DF for his lack of fanboyism when testing always have a limited number of games. I mean in his video obout vram limitations of 4060ti 8gb he didnt test none of the games that actually had issues but Control with raytracing lol You need be a dumbass to think these guys care about PC gaming. Their PC games analysis are always late compared to consoles, whining about state of pc ports, short reviews and like others pointed out full of mistakes. Nvidia sponsors them they talk about some features say some nice things about it and thats it.
Doesn't change that this game runs like crap, options menu is badly bugged etc. If somebody doesn't care about PC gaming, it's Respawn. Visuals in the open areas with foliage are also simply sh*t, RotTR looked better...
Might not entirely be on Respawn. Worth remembering who their parent company and publisher is. EA is another company with a long history of not allowing games to be supported or polished properly. Respawn got incredibly lucky with Apex Legends, with EA basicly leaving them alone, but for this game... likely not the case.
I think it's entirely on Respawn. The kumbaya about big bad EA might've worked for Fallen Order along with that being their first UE4 game, but not now. And FO never got fixed. And there's a detailed post which explained a likely cause of all the traversal stutters that game had and Survivor has as well. And it wasn't because EA didn't give them something. It's largely incompetence/lack of care. This system just doesn't work right now. UE4-5 is the main work horse in game dev, it's basically a platform of sorts, yet Epic doesn't seem to fully give a frack about how good it's image is. It'll likely be fixed in 2-3 years time, given that devs and audience largely is aware of all the various problems now, mostly thanks to DF ofc and their effort. Others just like to put procreating numbers on games and express their ever important opinions on them, no one have time to do something actually useful. Like figure out wtf is working and what's not. Except for DF. So, thanks to them imo.
I agree that Respawn owns this one. It's probably why the Game Director has left EA despite publicly stating that he wanted to do a trilogy. This game shipped really fast, less than 4 years of development time for such a big game and one that was geared towards the current gen consoles which have vastly different hardware capabilities compared to the Xbox One and PS4. The addition of ray tracing really complicated the optimization effort as well, because to do RT properly, developers need to have solid CPU and memory optimization. Compare Jedi Survivor to a game like Ratchet and Clank A Rift Apart and it's clear that the latter is totally and utterly superior in terms of optimization and hardware utilization.
The person that found why Jedi Survivor has performance issues has nothing to do with Digital Foundry. Here are some of the tweets about it. One. Two. Tree. Four. Five. Six. Alex only makes a bunch of drama about it, but he has no capability to do in depth analysis like those. And his knowledge about hardware and game development s vey limited. Only when a dev tells him exactly what is happening in a game, can he then do something more elaborate. In reality, what he does is little more than looking at a frame time graph. But that is what everyone can do just by running RTSS. Another thing to consider is that DF's machines are underperforming for some reason. So they are probably seeing a lot more stutters, with bigger frame time spikes, than other users. So although the games they point out have issues, they are probably exacerbated by having a poorly configurated system.
I think some of that is unfair. They often get console codes but not PC codes from publishers so that is why some of the PC coverage is late. Also, they only have 4 or 5 staff and it takes around a week to do a video according to the weekly news show. In the case of the PC, they have voiced annoyance at often starting videos during the pre-release period for PC only to have the publishers update the games while they are testing and filming. Rather than release a PC video with inaccurate facts, they decide to hold off and redo parts of the video even though it will be later. I respect that personally. Bearing in mind, how long the videos take to put together, I can only imagine how frustrating that must be and why Alex Batalagia often sounds so pissed off about PC games in general. Other YouTube sites often have console and PC comparisons of games up much sooner but these are mostly just side-by-side comparisons with no commentary or discussion about how the game works or runs. They're serviceable and give you a general idea of how the PC version performs but I much prefer Digital Foundry's in-depth coverage even if I have to wait for it. And as a PC gamer who plays a LOT of games, I can fully sympathise with Alex B. over the state of PC games because there have been a LOT of awful PC versions in the last few years, many this year alone, and someone needs to call out developers for this. DF have a bigger voice than any of us. Publishers won't care about customer's complaining because they can just ignore them but if a high profile YouTube site covers the issues then they will almost certainly pay attention. DF were responsible for getting the annoying stutter, caused by using multiple DRMs, in Resident Evil Village fixed, something that Capcom ignored for MONTHS on PC.
You are giving them way too much credit. The case of stutter with RE8 was discovered after a cracker removed the DRM protection. Probably the first outlet to report on this was DSO and a youtuber called Sammy. And soon, forums were talking about it. Including gamers complaining about it in the Steam forums. DF only came about this issue later, well after it had exploded.
