Alex Battaglia and Oliver Mackenzie have tested Jedi: Survivor on PS5 Pro – and the results are mixed at best. Here’s the full Digital Foundry breakdown.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is not only the game with the weirdest semicolon placement in the industry, it also feels like one of the most-patched current-generation titles, after launching with a host of issues on PC and consoles alike. Jedi: Survivor recently received a PS5 Pro patch too, granting owners of the premium Sony console the potential for enhanced visuals and improved performance, but sadly only one of those objectives has been met here.
Starting with the basics, the PS5 Pro version of the game comes with two revised modes, a performance mode and a quality mode. It’s the performance mode that is more interesting, as it features the return of ray tracing features. You may remember that the game actually launched with RT effects in both modes on PS5, but this was subsequently removed in the performance mode to improve image quality while hitting the 60fps target more consistently. The new PS5 Pro performance mode brings those RT effects back, including RT reflections, RTGI (global illumination) and RTAO (ambient occlusion).
Unfortunately, the quality of these effects can be limited versus the game running on the base PS5 in quality mode. For example, reflections lack some geometry and even lighting in some parts of the first level, though later levels do show more similar outcomes. The RTGI and RTAO here are also quite subtle, to the point that we couldn’t confirm that RTAO was even present in the game until it was specifically mentioned in an EA blog post accompanying the PS5 Pro patch. Still, the RT can improve the look of many scenes, and it’s nice to see it in a 60fps-targeting mode.
The other key change here is the addition of PSSR upscaling, which promises better image quality than the FSR 2 used previously. Unfortunately, this promise is far from realised, with an extremely unstable resolve that looks dramatically worse than the PS5’s performance mode – you can see a kind of shimmering or pulsing constantly as artefacts appear and disappear across the screen. This is particularly prominent on natural environments with foliage, which flip from dark to light and back again with distracting regularity.
