AMD-Sponsored Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Gets Surprising DLSS 3 Update and Game Optimizations

Seemingly out of nowhere, Respawn just released a brand new performance patch for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor that (reportedly) greatly enhances the game’s performance on console and PC. Perhaps more importantly for PC users, the update also includes the official integration of DLSS 2 upscaling and DLSS 3 frame generation into the game.

According to the EA patch notes and official post on X (Twitter), the game has gone through a serious rework to provide a smooth 60FPS on consoles specifically. The console patch notes reveal that the game’s performance mode has been “completely reworked” to provide a substantially better gaming experience. Respawn says it has implemented a number of CPU and GPU optimizations, along with disabling ray tracing to enable a solid 60 FPS in performance mode.

Quality mode got some optimizations to reduce FPS fluctuations and has received additional visual improvements as well. Variable refresh rate support has also been implemented on the PS5 for variable refresh rate TVs and monitors.

For the PC, additional performance optimizations have been made, along with full official integration of DLSS. (For the past several months, DLSS has been unofficially available via a PureDark mod.) Respawn also fixed several game crashes and other bugs affecting save game corruption and visual bugs.

Did Modders Push Respawn to Include DLSS?

By far the most surprising addition to Jedi: Survivor is DLSS support, which was previously absent from the game. Since launch, GeForce RTX gamers have only had access to AMD’s FSR 2 technology, which many consider to be visually inferior to Nvidia’s AI-powered DLSS upscaling solution. It can also be less performant in some cases.

Prior to this latest update, the only way to get DLSS capabilities in Jedi: Survivor was through mods, more specifically the DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 mod made by PureDark. His work on Jedi: Survivor was one of the first demonstrations of how DLSS could be modded into games. His original DLSS 3 frame generation mod made major headlines back in May when it allowed RTX 40-series graphics cards to almost double the game’s frame rate. This was a big deal at the time, due to the fact the game ran very poorly on all PC hardware during its initial launch, and running DLSS 3 frame generation allowed the game to hit 60 FPS. Later, he added DLSS 2 upscaling support for Nvidia gamers who wanted even more performance without relying on FSR 2.

One key lesson that we learned from PureDark’s DLSS mods was that it apparently takes very little time or effort to implement DLSS alongside FSR 2, assuming the latter is already supported. Both technologies rely on the same inputs to run, so if a development team goes through the effort of integrating one upscaling solution, it can easily integrate the others as well. This applies to Intel’s XeSS upscaling solution as well, if you were wondering.

From a technical standpoint, there was very little reason for Respawn to not implement DLSS support. Many people originally thought that Respawn wasn’t including DLSS due to the fact Jedi: Survivor is an AMD-sponsored title. However, AMD says that it does not block DLSS integration with its sponsored titles — AMD technologies are merely prioritized.

With the huge success of PureDark’s free and paywalled DLSS mods (just check his Discord server memberships), it seems likely that PureDark gave Respawn an incentive to officially implement DLSS into the game. However, Respawn’s development resources are tight, even though Jedi: Survivor has been out for several months. EA currently has them working on a previous generation console port of the game for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, for some bewildering reason.

DLSS Performance and Image Quality in Jedi: Survivor

We captured the above photos and videos of Jedi Survivor with its new official DLSS implementation, with comparisons to native rendering and FSR 2 upscaling. What we found is that DLSS 2 image upscaling generally provides the best image quality overall, with less ghosting compared to FSR 2 and slightly sharper image quality compared to the game’s native TAA implementation (at native resolution). However, FSR 2 does have some potential advantages over DLSS — it’s down to personal preference more than anything else.

If you check the full size images we posted, the FSR 2 photo is arguably the best-looking image while the camera is not moving. Textures and objects are sharper than DLSS or native resolution. In motion, however, we feel the DLSS implementation looks better. You can check the above videos, though of course YouTube’s compression makes meaningful comparisons using those all but impossible.

Performance is basically identical between DLSS 2 image upscaling and FSR 2 upscaling, and both in their Quality mode provided the same level of performance. (Don’t look at the overlay as a true indication of performance, as that tends to fluctuate wildly, plus we were capturing the videos and that can also impact performance.) DLSS 3 frame generation unsurprisingly provides a massive boost in frame rate. I did not test it for long enough to know if the hit to input latency was worth the additional smoothness offered by frame generation.

Our limited testing was done with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, GeForce RTX 4070, and a 3440×1440 ultrawide monitor. Game settings were at Epic settings, RT enabled, vsync off, and the Quality upscaling setting for both DLSS 2 upscaling and FSR 2 upscaling.

Worth mention here is that support for XeSS was not included, even though that would presumably be pretty straightforward at this point. (Cue Obi Wan: “I felt a very tiny disturbance in the Force, as if dozens of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were ignored.”) Maybe that will come in the future, though at this stage we suspect FSR 2 and DLSS 3 will prove sufficient for Remedy’s purposes.