Electronic Arts has just released Star Wars: Squadrons on the PC and it has now been confirmed that Denuvo DRM is a thing for the game. The presence of Denuvo does not surprise many users and outlets, as EA loves DRM. Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order also used the infamous DRM solution. But what many users are curious about is what performance is like.
The core issues being noted are around CPU usage. The reports seem to report that the game will regularly fully load a modern CPU at 100%. There are also reports that framerates feel sluggish and the game just isn’t fun to play. Tests show that there may be some issues. Sure, the game looks impressive and would be a treat to any Star Wars fan, but there may be some bugs lurking in the system. One thing that was noted pretty regularly in various technical reports is that the game seems to have some weird kind of animation lag. That appears to be the cause of the sluggish feel.
There seems to be some kind of issue relating to refresh rate for certain elements. The game seems to run at the correct framerate and refresh rate overall, but one very important element is off. The animations of ships and certain effects seems to be capped at the wrong rate, regardless of other settings. It appears that newer panels that run at above 60 Hz are not displaying animations correctly. Users on the lower refresh rate panels seem to not be having the issue.
There is a way around this. You need to set your refresh rate to 59.95 Hz in the game settings. To get the full effect you will also need to enable VSync in-game. This means you will be capped and run at 60 FPS.
With this fix 100% CPU usage still occurs all the time, which sucks. It seems like the developer will be pushing a patch at some point.
