Star Wars Jedi Survivor new feature
News

Ray Tracing can look atrocious in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and you should completely disable it

38 Comments

You know what? I’ve been sitting on this since the game came out. Now as you may have heard, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor can look “amazing” with Ray Tracing. Or at least that’s what some people want to make you believe. The reality is that the Ray Tracing implementation in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is not that good. In fact, the game can look atrocious with Ray Tracing, and we highly recommend disabling it.

Before continuing, for our tests, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 531.68 driver. For those wondering, the gameplay footage of this video is from the game’s latest version (with its latest patch applied).

Ray Tracing in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor adds RTAO, RTGI on specific objects, and very few RT Reflections. The problem here, however, is that the radius of the RTAO is really short. As such, with RT On, you’ll get AWFUL visual changes while exploring the environments.

In the following video, we highlight these visual issues. As you can see, shadows can form right in front of you, completely changing the way things look. This happens when approaching objects, and when you’re getting away from them. As a result of that, there isn’t any visual consistency in this game with RT On. And yes, these visual issues are not present when you disable Ray Tracing.

Ray Tracing can look atrocious in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Now I seriously can’t believe anyone likes these constant visual issues that RTAO brings to the table. Okay okay, you might like them if you have myopia or something. These issues are as bad as the RT Shadows that could form right in front of you in The Witcher 3 Next-Gen. What’s also surprising is the fact that no one has commented on them. Does everyone have eyesight issues? How on Earth would you say that RT makes a world of difference in this game when you have constant visual issues right in front of you? Because, as you can clearly see in the video, you can immediately notice these shadow changes in real-time (we don’t have to zoom in, or play the video frame-by-frame. They are THAT obvious). And unlike the SSR reflections which only look bad on water, the RTAO issues occur constantly, throughout the entire game.

So yes, while in still images Ray Tracing may look good, in motion things simply fall apart. And, in my opinion, visual consistency is more important than standing still and looking at the environments. If people are fine with these atrocious visual changes that can occur right in front of them, they have no right at all criticizing things like DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Because I can’t honestly believe they can “feel” or spot the artifacts of those “fake frames” when they can’t see what’s happening right in front of them.

The best solution would have been to have different settings for the game’s RT effects. Respawn should have allowed players to enable/disable RTGI, RTAO and RT Reflections. If we had that, we could get the best of both worlds by only keeping RTGI and RT Reflections (until they could fix these RTAO issues).

Therefore, we suggest disabling Ray Tracing in order to get a more consistent visual experience. After all, the game already has major pop-in issues. So no, you don’t need more pop-ins due to this mediocre RT implementation. And lastly, we don’t know whether, and if, Respawn will address this issue or whether it will provide separate settings for the game’s RT effects!