Fix that worked for low FPS

[Evi1twin]

Update: I have created a steam guide of this post: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2975471422

I wanted to make a post that finally fixed the game for me. These won't work for everyone and may even be basic stuff, but I figured it's worth posting if it helps someone else. Before these changes, I was like everyone else and couldn't get above 40-50 fps no matter what settings. Kobo was frustratingly only getting 30-40. After these changes, I get 60-70 fps in Kobo and 70+ everywhere with 4k resolution, epic settings, and FSR disabled. Ray tracing still tanks my system so that's disabled. I also have a discussion at the bottom going into more detail what may be the issue with the bottlenecks if anyone is interested. I'd love to hear your opinions.

TLDR: Update bios only to enable Resizable BAR. Open "STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor" in NVIDIA profile Inspector. Under "5-Common" make the following changes:
rBAR - Feature = Enabled
rBAR - Options = 0x00000001 (List of a ton of games)
rBAR - Size Limit = 0x000000000C800000
Optional: Shadercache - Cachesize = Unlimited
Apply changes

(I know I have top of the line hardware but the before and after fps was dramatic so hopefully this helps lower spec hardware some as well)
Specs:
RTX 4090 (531.79 driver)
i7-10700k 3.6-4.9Ghz (turbo overclock)
32 GB Ram (XMP enabled)
MSI MPG Z490

Detailed Steps:
1. I only recommend updating your bios to enable Resizable BAR (rBAR) if the options isn't available.
*For some reason, my mobo didn't ship with the options so I've always thought I was out of luck. Trying everything to fix this game, I updated the bios after I saw they added "compatibility for 3000 nvidia cards". This apparently meant adding rBAR.

2. Enabled rBAR in the bios settings. This can be tricky to find, mine was in the following path:
Overclock->OC Options->Expert
Overclock->CPU Advanced Settings->Resizable BAR->Enabled
*I feel kinda dumb never having this enabled but to my credit it came in a bios update and is in a nonsensical location.

3. Download and unzip the latest Nvidia Profile Inspector.
https://github.com/Orbmu2k/nvidiaProfileInspector/releases
Assets->nvidiaProfileInspector.zip

4. Open Nvidia Profile Inspector and enter the following for the Profile:
"STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor"
You should be able to select it as you type it out.

5. Navigate to "5 - Common" and make the following changes:
rBAR - Feature = Enabled
rBAR - Options = 0x00000001 (List of a ton of games)
rBAR - Size Limit = 0x000000000C800000
Optional: Shadercache - Cachesize = Unlimited
*I got the options following what other games used that I have installed. I have no idea what they actually do. Not sure why, but Nvidia requires a developer apply to enable rBAR in their game by default. These settings come with your driver and not the game itself so Jedi Survivor didn't do this. Most games work with rBAR they just haven't enabled or applied for it to be added to Nvidia's drivers.

6. Click "Apply changes" in the top right.
* If this doesn't work for you and you'd like to revert these settings you can click the green Nvidia icon in top toolbar. It's the same icon as the nvidia control panel app. Hovering over should show "Restore Current profile to Nvidia defaults"

Done. You should be good to start you game again.

Recommend:
Excellent mod created by Glumboi on Nexus. I recommend build a .pak file to install the modification. Instructions in the details of the mod.
https://www.nexusmods.com/starwarsjedisurvivor/mods/7

Discussion:
I see a lot of people randomly have solid performance in this game. Almost like the actual hardware specs didn't matter. This didn't make sense to me since in reality everyone is probably running the same drivers. Even systems with the same hardware would have dramatically different performance. I figured there had to be some configuration issue and maybe rBAR is the differentiating factor. Would like to hear if this works for anyone else.

Looking more into rBAR, it opens up your graphics card VRAM completely to your CPU. It's orders of magnitude larger. One article said by default the CPU only reads 256Mb blocks of data but with rBAR it opens up the entire VRAM capacity which would be 8-24 Gb. Jedi Survivor does the whole shader optimize operation which I assume pre-loads all the shaders (maybe textures) into the VRAM on startup. On the first launch it may compile the shaders with the following startups just loading them idk. Anyways, Jedi Survivor was upfront about their large VRAM usage which I think could be linked to the CPU bottlenecks. The game loads tons of shaders into memory, but then most CPUs have to do multiple operations to read this whole buffer each frame. If Jedi Survivor always has lets say 5Gb VRAM used that the CPU has to load every single frame, the CPU will bottle neck if it's only reading 256 Mb each time.

For an analogy, lets say generating a single frame is like delivering a delicious pepperoni pizza to a customer down the street. The time it takes to drive to this customer is always the same. Obviously, it's going to be faster if you deliver the whole pizza at once instead of delivering each single slice one at a time. Instead of 1 trip, you're making 8 trips with the standard cut pie. Now, you may be able to increase the heat of your ovens to cook the pizza faster (Overclock CPU/GPU) or deliver it under cooked (low settings) to prepare the pizza for delivery faster, but no matter what it still takes the exact same time to drive and deliver the pizza to the customer.

If you look at CPU performance you can see this. Mine looked like a saw tooth pattern. You could see the GPU render or do whatever i needs then stop. A short time later it would startup again but never running consistently. Same exact thing with the CPU. I assume the actual reading of the VRAM is cheap so it doesn't take much utilization and instead time.

Hopefully this gives some more insight into this problem. If you got this far, i'd love to hear opinions. I'll be open that i'm a software engineer so this comes from some experience although I don't work on video games. I suppose I learned a lot from this broken game which may arguably be better than actually playing playing it :).

[Cipher]

Would love to try this out but Inspector keep giving me a data type mismatch error that I have never encountered before. Getting this game to run is a rabbit hole.

Edit: Performance on the second open world planet is noticeably better but the massive frame drops still remain. Running on a 4080

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by Cipher:

Would love to try this out but Inspector keep giving me a data type mismatch error that I have never encountered before. Getting this game to run is a rabbit hole.

Strange, that sounds like a bug with Nvidia inspector. I've only seen that in my apps that the code was wrong. If you know code, it's usually something like setting an integer to a string variable. May try downloading latest and running as admin. You can also try cleaning your drivers then reinstalling. I usually manually download the driver from nvidia then use the custom or advanced option to clean install. I wonder if a profile somewhere is messed up so nvidia inspector crashes when it tries to read that old profile.

[Johnny Lawrence]

Doesn't work

[jpwiseguy]

Yah, good stuff there. This does make a noticeable difference for me on my 13700K / 4070 Ti.

Some other things I highly recommend are to change Windows to High Performance profile, and use an app like "ParkControl" to un-park any CPU cores that might be parking. It doesn't change anything in Windows, registry settings or any of that, it only changes the power profile settings, which can always be reset to defaults with a click. I noticed on my CPU that a few of the P-Cores were at 0% using MSI Afterburner without unparking cores. And as a result my frame rate would drop below 60. I can't have that.

Another thing that helped me, which I am very surprised at, is setting the display to 60 or 120Hz even on a monitor that is 144, 165 and up. Disabling any VSYNC either in driver or in-game, and locking the frame rate to 60 FPS using RTSS (Riva Tuner Statistics Server) which comes with MSI Afterburner. Perhaps something to do with the game being designed to run on consoles at 30 or 60HZ / FPS? That is just a guess though, I really don't know. However, Variable Refresh rate tech like as GSYNC or FreeSync don't seem to mess with this either, just judging by my own experience. But that this actually helped me more than anything. More than you'd think it would. and definitely more than it should.

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by Cipher:

Would love to try this out but Inspector keep giving me a data type mismatch error that I have never encountered before. Getting this game to run is a rabbit hole.

Edit: Performance on the second open world planet is noticeably better but the massive frame drops still remain. Running on a 4080

Just saw your edit. These results are after you made the changes? I'm past the second planet but I did try the 3rd planet kobo moon . It was hovering above 60 fps with some dips in the upper 50s. Those dips happened in a large room with some big electric looking rings in the middle you can zip line through. Previously that room was literally 20-30 fps. It's not perfect but an improvement for sure. I can try and test the second planet.

[CJM]

Originally posted by El Guapo:

I noticed on my CPU that a few of the P-Cores were at 0% using MSI Afterburner without unparking cores. And as a result my frame rate would drop below 60. I can't have that.

Unparking P-Cores was anything more than a placebo with regards to this game???

Is Ray Tracing that heavy?

Originally posted by El Guapo:

and locking the frame rate to 60 FPS using RTSS (Riva Tuner Statistics Server) which comes with MSI Afterburner. Perhaps something to do with the game being designed to run on consoles at 30 or 60HZ / FPS? That is just a guess though, I really don't know.

Yeah, I think locking the frame rate is about the only thing that helps.

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by El Guapo:

Yah, good stuff there. This does make a noticeable difference for me on my 13700K / 4070 Ti.

Some other things I highly recommend are to change Windows to High Performance profile, and use an app like "ParkControl" to un-park any CPU cores that might be parking. It doesn't change anything in Windows, registry settings or any of that, it only changes the power profile settings, which can always be reset to defaults with a click. I noticed on my CPU that a few of the P-Cores were at 0% using MSI Afterburner without unparking cores. And as a result my frame rate would drop below 60. I can't have that.

Another thing that helped me, which I am very surprised at, is setting the display to 60 or 120Hz even on a monitor that is 144, 165 and up. Disabling any VSYNC either in driver or in-game, and locking the frame rate to 60 FPS using RTSS (Riva Tuner Statistics Server) which comes with MSI Afterburner. Perhaps something to do with the game being designed to run on consoles at 30 or 60HZ / FPS? That is just a guess though, I really don't know. However, Variable Refresh rate tech like as GSYNC or FreeSync don't seem to mess with this either, just judging by my own experience. But that this actually helped me more than anything. More than you'd think it would. and definitely more than it should.

I run mine in ultimate performance which is a silly name. Think only difference it HDD doesn't sleep but I have NVME so doubt it matters. I've never heard of ParkControl! I'll try it out. If I see an improvement i'll add it to the post with credits.

I'm on a 120Hz monitor so it's already there. I actually forced vsync (fast) in nvidia control panel so i'll instead turn that off to lock it with RTSS. Already using it to monitor fps and I have gsync so there shouldn't be any screen tears. However, this can make sense why it impacts performance based on the type of game. I'm a huge Soulsborne fan and have got into modding souls games. Those games like to be locked to 60 fps although there are mods to unlock framerate. I assume action games do calculations on a per frame basis and modulating that framerate may require extra processing to compensate for the change in framerate. No concrete evidence so this is a guess on my part. Original dark souls had to have a remaster version with 60fps since the animations were created for 30fps as one example. All other souls games from my knowledge ship with hard 60fps lock including elden ring.

[Cipher]

Originally posted by Evi1twin:

Originally posted by Cipher:

Would love to try this out but Inspector keep giving me a data type mismatch error that I have never encountered before. Getting this game to run is a rabbit hole.

Edit: Performance on the second open world planet is noticeably better but the massive frame drops still remain. Running on a 4080

Just saw your edit. These results are after you made the changes? I'm past the second planet but I did try the 3rd planet kobo moon . It was hovering above 60 fps with some dips in the upper 50s. Those dips happened in a large room with some big electric looking rings in the middle you can zip line through. Previously that room was literally 20-30 fps. It's not perfect but an improvement for sure. I can try and test the second planet.

Yes, I got these results after making the changes you posted. This definitely has had some positive effect on the avg framerate and gpu usage. I'm getting avg usage now of 60-70% which is unprecedented for this game. Whenever the framerate tanks that drops to around 40% so there is still some work for them to do, but your guide has helped out a lot. Thanks bunches

The issue with Inspector was just a matter of restoring to the original Nvidia settings, then making the changes. No worries at all.

Running on a 9900k/4080 1440p

[The73atman86]

you shouldnt have to do all of this to get descent gameplay from a 70$ game

[AceflieR]

Originally posted by The73atman86:

you shouldnt have to do all of this to get descent gameplay from a 70$ game

PC has been about tweaking sytem for me at least since 1988 before that it was real floppy disks and pray the game loads up after 7 hours. This is a part of owning a gaming pc and its more compounded these days with the amount of hardware vendors are pushing out 30 diff brand cpu's each with as many Motherboards these days. So yeah odds are you are going to have to tweak your system for best performance. Always has been that way and always will be.

And I have had rBar on in every game since I booted the system among other things I do to power settings/cpu parking Virtual memory disabling processes ect ect on every OS install. I do all of these things before I even load up steam or anything but drivers right from day 1. From there its finding my Max stable overclock/undervolt GPU/CPU these days for maximum performance of my system.

[Micas]

Ya, tweaking on PC has always been a thing, but sometimes games are just completely broken and shouldn't have been released until it's in a much better state. I've never understood the publisher's mentality to "just ship it", but I suppose it must be financially preferable than to actually spend the time to get it right. It's weird.

[Devon]

What about for AMD users?

[Gabriel Angelos]

this will lower your fps....

[Jerricky Jebates]

I've already explained this day one and was told by multiple people it was placebo, so I stopped arguing with people and just enjoyed the benefits myself. Also if you got a 4090 you should be using the frame gen mod, it has the most impact. I played the whole game 4k 100+

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by Gabriel Angelos:

this will lower your fps....

Did you try the fix? I'm not sure if it'll work for everyone unfortunately, but it significantly helped on my system. Others have confirmed in this thread and a post I made on reddit they've had similar results.