The big day is here. We're of course talking about the release of
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the relatively short-awaited sequel to
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Unfortunately, it's release on PC is hampered by performance issues, which thus far have earned it a 'Mostly Negative' rating on Steam. However, EA has promised weeks of patches. In addition, the big three GPU makers—AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA—have all released driver updates with optimizations for EA's latest title.
NVIDIA Game Ready 531.68 GPU Driver
Starting with NVIDIA, its 531.68 WHQL driver package for GeForce GPUs has been available for the past week and a half. According to the release notes, it "provides the best gaming experience for the latest new titles including Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Dead Island 2."
NVIDIA's latest driver release also fixes a small handful of issues. They include...
- [Immortals Fenyx Rising] is randomly crashing to desktop after a driver update to
531.41
- Shadowplay incorrectly getting engaged within EA Play application
- [Counter Strike 2] Enabling Reflex may reduce performance
You can grab NVIDIA's 531.68 WHQL driver update through its GeForce Experience utility or from the company's
driver download page.
AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 23.4.1 GPU Driver
For those of you who own a Radeon GPU, you'll want to nab AMD's Adrenalin Edition 23.4.3 driver package. It's also specifically optimized for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and like NVIDIA's update it includes some notable bug fixes. They include the following...
- Red corruption may occur in World War Z: Aftermath when using the Vulkan API
- Longer than expected shader compilation time when first launching The Last of Us Part I.
One thing
The Last of Us Part I has in common with
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is that it too debuted to a
rash of negative reviews on Steam. Fortunately, however, developer Naughty Dog has been busy releasing patch after patch since the game came out a month and a half ago, the latest of which includes
several more bug fixes and various CPU and GPU optimizations.
The 23.4.3 driver release is available through the Radeon Software utility or from
AMD's website.
Intel 31.0.101.4335 Beta Game On Arc GPU Driver
Finally, Intel is also getting in on the day-1 driver optimization action with its 'Game On' 31.0.101.4335 driver release. While labeled as a beta release, it's your best bet for playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on an Arc A-series GPU. It's also optimized for two other games—The Swordsmen X: Survival and Redfall, the latter of which release on May 1.
Intel is a relative newcomer to the modern discrete GPU scene and has done a good job on the software side with timely and effective driver updates. That said, this beta update is solely about performance optimizations and doesn't include any bug fixes that we're aware of (there's no mention of any in the release notes, anyway).
You can have Intel's Arc Control software fetch the latest driver or head to Intel's
Arc graphics driver page to install it manually.
Bear in mind that you might still run into some early hiccups even with the latest GPU driver installed for whatever graphics card you're running. Early reviews on Steam complain about performance issues despite running higher end hardware—one of the complaints comes from a gamer running a Core i9-13900KF paired with a GeForce RTX 4090.
Be on the lookout for patches, though. Prior to the game's release,
EA stated it would launch a day-1 update followed by more patches "in the weeks ahead" to fix bugs, improve performance, and add more accessibility features.