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 :).

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by TrippyTaka:

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.

Yea it's weird. This post and one I made on reddit are going almost unnoticed even though it's worked for almost everyone. This completely fixed it for me which I think is huge since it does start to explain why random systems may have much better performance than others. They may have rBAR already enabled but just aren't aware is my guess. I agree though, at least we can both enjoy the game :)

[Jerricky Jebates]

Originally posted by Evi1twin:

Originally posted by TrippyTaka:

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.

Yea it's weird. This post and one I made on reddit are going almost unnoticed even though it's worked for almost everyone. This completely fixed it for me which I think is huge since it does start to explain why random systems may have much better performance than others. They may have rBAR already enabled but just aren't aware is my guess. I agree though, at least we can both enjoy the game :)

dude if you got a 4090 you should really check out puredark's frame generation mod, it makes 99% of the experience 4k120

[Evi1twin]

Originally posted by TrippyTaka:

Originally posted by Evi1twin:

Yea it's weird. This post and one I made on reddit are going almost unnoticed even though it's worked for almost everyone. This completely fixed it for me which I think is huge since it does start to explain why random systems may have much better performance than others. They may have rBAR already enabled but just aren't aware is my guess. I agree though, at least we can both enjoy the game :)

dude if you got a 4090 you should really check out puredark's frame generation mod, it makes 99% of the experience 4k120

Hey, I have tried his mod but haven't used it after the latest update. I think I remember removing it since the frame generation caused weird motion ghosting. That was probably because my base framerate was so low that frame gen didn't have much to work with. I'll give it another try! Thanks!

[Professor Pigeon]

Or instead of doing all this, roll back to an earlier driver

[eis]

ResizableBAR worked my J:S very smoothly.
Also my FC24 performance has rized.
THX veryveryvery much.

[JoK3R]

Thank will try this.

[Big CLAPPER]

I know this post is kinda old but i just wanted to share this,

For whatever reason this game does not like Hyperthreading/SMT CPUs (Intel PCs call it Hyperthreading, AMD PCs call it SMT). No exaggeration 80% + of the performance issues in general and the issue with the map are because of Hyperthreading/SMT. I turned Hyperthreading/SMT off and my frames dont drop when looking at galaxy map anymore and i have significantly better performance across the board now.

Turning off Hyperthreading/SMT is pretty easy if you're PC smart, if you're not PC smart it might be hard for you because the setting is in the BIOS. If you don't know what you're doing i suggest looking up a video on how to disable Hyperthreading/SMT. Either way the setting for Hyperthreading/SMT is usually in the overclock/OC settings of the BIOS, you want to turn it off.

If you have an Intel motherboard it's called Hyperthreading,

If you have an AMD motherboard it's called SMT,

same thing different name.

Highly recommend turning Hyperthreading/SMT back on after you stop playing or beat the game as it's semi vital to other games and PC functions (you lose to ability to put your PC to sleep with Hyperthreading/SMT off for example)

Side note worth mentioning, the Galaxy map specifically appears to have a separate bug where if you move the cursor right away when opening it, it can cause a slight but noticable frame rate loss that will persist everytime you look at the Galaxy map until you restart the game. While this is noticable its nowhere near as bad as the galaxy map is when Hyperthreading/SMT is also enabled and the map tanks to 10FPS. Solution for this is pretty simple, when you open the galaxy map just wait like 1 or 2 seconds it doesn't have to be long but just give it a second to load everything before moving the cursor and if you do you wont have any droped frames. I suspect this bug and the Hyperthreading/SMT thing together is why the galaxy map specifically just sh*ts the bed sometimes, the galaxy map is just really resource heavy in this game.

The normal local map is not effected by any of this, only the galaxy map.

Absolutely incredible this is the cause of the majority of the performance issues in this game and even more incredible is the fact this game is over a year old now and this still hasn't been fixed. Truly a turd PC port. Hope this helps anyone who comes across this.