Last week, Ubisoft released its latest Star Wars open-world game, Star Wars: Outlaws. Star Wars: Outlaws is powered by the Snowdrop engine, so it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 560.94, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.8.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Ubisoft has included a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Microdetail, Shadows, Particles, Terrain Tessellation and more. There are also options for Film Grain, DoF, Motion Blur and Chromatic Aberration.
Do note that the game has Ray Tracing, even on its lowest settings. In other words, you can’t completely disable RT. So, what are the RT effects that the game uses by default? RTGI, RT reflections, and RT shadows.
Not only that but the PC version comes with support for RTXDI. RTXDI is NOT RTGI. Instead, RTXDI replaces all of the game’s direct lighting. This will allow almost all light sources to cast shadows. Plus, the RTXDI shadows will look better and more realistic than the shadowmaps that the game used in its non-RT version. DF did a great job at explaining RTXDI, so make sure to watch their video.
The PC-only features do not stop here. Ubisoft has also added support for DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction. Oh, and there is also support for AMD FSR 3.0 FG, meaning everyone can use Frame Generation to hit higher framerates. And believe me. You’ll need it in Ultra settings.
Massive Entertainment has not included a built-in benchmark tool. This comes as a surprise as Avatar, which was powered by the same engine, did have one. Since there isn’t a built-in benchmark, for our tests, we used the first city you encounter in the game. This appears to be a demanding area.
From what we could see, Star Wars: Outlaws is mostly a GPU-bound title. Our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was used to its fullest, even at 1080p. So, there wasn’t really a point simulating different CPU configurations.
At Native 1080p/Ultra Settings/No RTXDI, our top four GPUs were able to push framerates higher than 60fps at all times. The RTX2080Ti was also able to provide a smooth gaming experience with a minimum of 58fps and an average of 64fps.
At Native 1440p/Ultra/No RTXDI, the only GPUs that were able to run Star Wars: Outlaws with more than 60fps were the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA RTX 4090. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT and NVIDIA RTX 3080 were also able to provide a playable experience, provided you use a FreeSync/GSync monitor.
Finally, at Native 4K/Ultra/No RTXDI, the only GPU that was able to provide a smooth gaming experience was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. Again, this is at Native 4K and the game has Ray Tracing effects on Ultra settings, even without using RTXDI.
And since we mentioned RTXDI, here are some comparison screenshots. The non-RTXDI screenshots are on the left, whereas the RTXDI screenshots are on the right. RTXDI can improve the game’s shadows. This can be very subtle at times. At other times, it can be very noticeable. In static screenshots, you may also think that the shadows in the last comparison are fine. In motion, though, the non-RTXDI version looks AWFUL as the grass shadows are full of aliasing.
The bad news here is that RTXDI comes with a HUGE performance hit in grassy areas. At 4K on Ultra settings with DLSS 3 Quality and Frame Generation, we witnessed drops to 50fps on the NVIDIA RTX 4090. That’s WITH Frame Generations. And, yes. That’s LOWER than Black Myth: Wukong with its Full Ray Tracing/Path Tracing effects. I don’t really know what’s going on here. However, you know there is something wrong when a non-path-traced game runs worse than a path-traced one.
DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction also comes with a 10fps performance hit. This caught me off guard as I wasn’t expecting this big of a hit from it. There are visual benefits here, no doubt about that. But for a game that runs so poorly with RTXDI, it makes no sense to enable it even on the most powerful GPU. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to use RTXDI, you can enable DLSS 3.5 RR and enjoy its visual improvements.
It’s worth noting that Star Wars: Outlaws can scale down on older GPUs. By dropping to High, we were able to increase performance by 25% on the NVIDIA RTX4090 at Native 4K. Then, on Medium settings, we got an additional 12% performance boost.
Graphics-wise, Star Wars: Outlaws does not come close to what we’ve seen in the most recent Unreal Engine 5 games. The game also looks too soft right now, even at 4K. This appears to be related to the “Lens and Cinematic” setting. By setting this to Medium, the game will look sharper. However, it can cause additional aliasing. There are also numerous visual artifacts from the software-based RTGI. The animations of characters are also a bit rough, and nowhere close to what you’d expect from a triple-A title.
In all honesty, Black Myth: Wukong and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 look like next-gen games compared to Star Wars: Outlaws. They also run better than Star Wars: Outlaws. So, this may give us an idea of how efficient UE5 can be when it comes to Ray Tracing. And although Horizon: Forbidden West does not have any RT effects, it can look better than the non-RTXDI version of Star Wars: Outlaws.
Now the good news here is that I did not experience any major stuttering issues. The game was also stable as I didn’t get any crashes. PC controls are also responsive. As such, the game plays great with a keyboard and a mouse.
All in all, Star Wars: Outlaws is a mixed bag. Performance is great without RTXDI, and the game can scale on older GPUs. However, there are various visual issues. For instance, shadows from the sun can look low-res and awful. RTXDI fixes this. The game also has blur, aliasing and ghosting issues, caused by the upscaling techniques, DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction and the “Cinematic” setting. And when you disable them, you get other visual issues. For example, without DLSS 3.5 RR, you get A LOT of visual RT artifacts in shadowy places. And even with all its RT effects, Star Wars: Outlaws cannot match the visuals (and the performance) of Black Myth: Wukong or Hellblade 2. Or Alan Wake 2. So, let’s hope that the devs will bring some optimizations via some patches!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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