Introduction

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was released on April 28th and on launch day the PC game had support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 (FSR 2.2) as the only available upscaling solution. After four months Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment has now released official support for NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution (DLSS 3.1) and NVIDIA's DLSS Frame Generation (also known as DLSS 3) with Patch 7. In order to run Jedi: Survivor at maximum graphics settings and reasonable framerates at native resolution, quite a powerful GPU is required, which is why upscaling solutions are so important. But depending on the game, there can be significant differences in the implementations of NVIDIA's DLSS/FG and AMD's FSR, so we are keen to have a look at these temporal upscalers in this game.



Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p and 1080p resolutions, and in the various DLSS and FSR quality modes; TAA and DLSS Frame Generation screenshots are also available in the dropdown menu. For those who want to see how these technologies perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video, to help uncover issues like shimmering or temporal instability, which may not be visible in the game screenshots.

While the game ships with FSR in a separate DLL file, marked with "version 2.0," it really is 2.2 based on our own testing. The easiest way to detect whether a game actually uses FSR 2.1 or 2.2 is by looking at shimmering, which is dealt with differently, depending on the version number.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU at Epic graphics settings with ray tracing disabled; motion blur, chromatic aberration and depth of field were disabled for better image viewing. DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation in this game shipped with version 3.1.13.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the DLSS Super Resolution implementation has one major issue—it does not work in Fullscreen mode and you have to run the game in Windowed Fullscreen mode in order to use DLSS. For some people it may be not a big of an issue, but for those who enjoy using NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) or Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR) and want to use DLSS with DSR/DLDSR, you first need to set the desktop resolution to a desirable DSR/DLDSR resolution, launch the game in windowed fullscreen mode and enable DLSS, which is a tedious process for no good technical reason.

The in-game TAA solution and DLSS implementation don't include sharpening filters in the render path, and there's no direct option in the menu to enable it. However, the FSR 2.2 implementation provides a sharpening filter in the render path without the ability to tweak the sharpening values through a sharpening slider, it is set to the low value by the developers, which might be even unnoticeable in some sequences of the game, especially at higher resolutions, and the sharpening filter does not cause any negative side effects or artifacts during gameplay.

The quality of the default anti-aliasing method (TAA) in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor struggles to render small objects and thin details like steel objects, power lines, tree leaves and vegetation, and often results in a blurry overall image, especially noticeable across different resolutions, even at 4K. Most of these issues with the in-game TAA solution are resolved with either FSR 2.2 or DLSS enabled.

Speaking of upscaling solutions and how they visually compare, both the FSR 2.2 and DLSS implemenations share one major advantage in comparison to the in-game TAA solution—rendering an improved quality of small objects and thin details like steel structures, power lines, tree leaves and vegetation. FSR 2.2 only improves these details at a close view distance, while DLSS improves the overall image detail even at far distances. However, in this game, both FSR 2.2 and DLSS have their own issues and artifacts that the in-game TAA solution does not.

FSR 2.2 is suffering from ghosting issues specifically on particle effects, especially when wielding the light saber during combat, and the hair rendering in motion is also suffering from ghosting and disocclusion artifacts with FSR 2.2 enabled. The second-most-noticeable problem is the quality of built-in anti-aliasing in the FSR 2.2 render path, it has some visible pixelation, mainly around the main character and enemies, and this can be distracting in motion, especially at lower resolutions. The FSR 2.2 implementation also introduces a small amount of shimmering in motion on vegetation and tree leaves at lower resolutions, such as 1080p and 1440p.

The DLSS Super Resolution implementation lacks a sharpening filter in the render path, which results in a softer overall image compared to the FSR 2.2 implementation with its built-in sharpening filter, even when set to the low value. The DLSS implementation also has major issues with very visible noise disrupting grass at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, even when standing still. These noise artifacts don't look like common shimmering, but rather as if ray traced shadows or ambient occlusion were applied to the grass without a denoising pass. It's important to note that we have disabled all ray tracing effects in our testing.

The DLSS Frame Generation implementation also isn't perfect in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, as it is suffering from ghosting issues, specifically when wielding the light saber during combat, and around the main character and enemies. The visibility of these ghosting issues will vary depending on your framerate. For example, the issues are more visible at 60 FPS, whereas at 120 FPS they become much less noticeable. The DLSS Frame Generation implementation in the current state also has some issues with the in-game on-screen UI, which has a small amount of jittering in motion. Interestingly, you can fix these ghosting and jittering issues by manually downgrading the DLSS Frame Generation version from version 3.1.13 to 1.0.7.

Speaking of performance, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a very CPU intensive game, especially with ray tracing enabled, as the CPU usage is mostly single-threaded on PC due to a very poor implementation of DirectX 12 in Unreal Engine 4, and high-powered GPUs such as the GeForce RTX 4080 can end up CPU bottlenecked at 1440p and lower resolutions. In such CPU limited scenarios, a very welcome help comes from the DLSS Frame Generation technology, which has the ability to bypass CPU limitations and increase the framerate. With DLSS Super Resolution in Quality mode and DLSS Frame Generation enabled, you can expect more than doubled performance at 4K and 1440p, and during our testing, overall gameplay felt very smooth and responsive, we haven't spotted any issues with input latency.