Star Wars Outlaws in Standard Technology Test

ComputerBase looked at the PC version of Star Wars Outlaws and created comprehensive graphics card benchmarks and analysis. In addition to GPU tests, the focus was on ray tracing image quality, which plays a crucial role in the game. If you want to use it, you need a high-quality processor from Nvidia.

Star Wars Outlaws: PC Edition Tech

With Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft is trying its hand at an open-world game in the Star Wars universe for the first time and has brought on developers from Massive Entertainment, who previously worked on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and The Division. It’s no surprise that the in-house Snowdrop engine, which Massive developed extensively for Avatar and continues to do so here, will also be used.

This means that Star Wars Outlaws always uses ray tracing for lighting, shadows, and reflections – and it can never be turned off. So ray tracing is optimally integrated into the game, which usually benefits both visual impression and performance – and this worked very well in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. If your graphics card doesn't support ray tracing, you have to resort to a simple fallback mode, which didn't work visually, at least in Avatar.

Visually, Star Wars Outlaws is a double-edged sword. The developers wanted to create a “cinematic look” for the game, which means that the scenes are always in 21:9 format. There are also a lot of post-processing filters on the graphics, which also appear very blurry, which is unusual for games at this level. You have to get used to it, and some people simply will not like it. Star Wars Outlaws is generally a vague and overdone game – at least that is the editor's personal opinion.

Ray tracing is very good, characters and animations are not good.

This is a shame, because the graphics once again have a lot to offer. Ray tracing plays a notably major role in the quality of the graphics, with lighting and reflections at a very good level, and maintained throughout the game. The game world is depicted in great detail and the art style is undoubtedly reminiscent of Star Wars. This is what the world of the movies or series could look like. The atmosphere is very dense and can be easily carried away by the optics.

Sharpness aside, Star Wars Outlaws' graphics only have one real problem, but it's not a small one at all. The animations and facial expressions are no longer up to par; other games are much more advanced. Especially in Senua's Saga: Hellblade II (test) or The Last of Us Part II, the characters are on a completely different level, but they also look noticeably better in many other games. A big AAA title – which Ubisoft recently coined “AAAA” – should be able to do this better.

Reduction plays a very important role.

Upsampling plays a very important role in Star Wars Outlaws, because without it the game will not run smoothly, even on high-end hardware. The title supports AMD FSR, Nvidia DLSS, and Intel XeSS in the ultra-high-resolution version, and DLSS and FSR are also available with frame generation. Obviously, FSR is still version 3.0: FSR FG cannot be combined with other ultra-high-resolution technologies.

Unsurprisingly, Nvidia DLSS performs best, but AMD FSR and Intel XeSS also produce decent images. The algorithms take advantage of the fact that Star Wars Outlaws has generally smooth graphics, so image stability remains even at lower resolutions with FSR. The main issues with FSR are annoying artifacts and “clumpy graphics,” but both are relatively less noticeable in Outlaws. FSR is fun to play with, though DLSS undoubtedly produces consistently better results.

Frame generation is good with both DLSS and FSR, and there's nothing to complain about here, at least in the context of a short analysis. As usual, FSR FG achieves a much higher FPS gain than DLSS Frame Generation and works on all graphics cards – but the generally weaker downsampling should be used with FSR Supersolution.

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In addition, technology tests will appear staggered from time to time, so that the entire article is not provided at once, but is worked on with updates. In order to inform the reader exactly what content the editorial team is working on and which sections are still expected, they will be included without content when published. The missing part will be delivered over the next few days. However, there is no guarantee that the relevant section will definitely appear.

Official System Requirements