Star Wars Outlaws — out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC is an open-world action-adventure game from the house of Ubisoft. Developed by Massive Entertainment in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, the game is set between the events of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi movies. You play as Kay Vess, who’s accompanied by Nix — a cute but feral and vicious little fella. The game highly relies on stealth and exploration, wherein you’ll find Kay traversing between planets and running life-threatening errands for various syndicates.
Outlaws not only depends on indoor settings but also keeps switching to the beautiful outside world that is filled with vegetation, locals, creatures, and speeders. It also introduces some PC-exclusive settings, which give it a fidelity boost. That said, these are the same things that make Star Wars Outlaws a demanding title — so make sure you have a high-end system to enjoy the visual fidelity that lies in the galaxy far, far away.
Star Wars Outlaws PC System Requirements
With the below-listed components, it becomes pretty clear that Star Wars Outlaws does demand a lot in terms of sheer raw performance. More importantly, these requirements highlight the high ask for VRAM — which didn’t go unnoticed during the tests.
Star Wars Outlaws PC Minimum Requirements for Low Graphics (1080p at 30fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB) or AMD RX 5600XT (6GB) or Intel Arc A750 (8GB) (ReBar On) |
| Storage | 65 GB available storage |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Star Wars Outlaws PC Recommended Requirements for High Graphics (1080p at 60fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i5-10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060Ti (8GB) or AMD RX 6700XT (12GB) |
| Storage | 65 GB available storage |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Star Wars Outlaws PC Recommended Requirements for Enthusiast Graphics (1440p at 60fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i5-11600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 (12GB) or AMD RX 6800XT (16GB) |
| Storage | 65 GB available storage |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Star Wars Outlaws PC Recommended Requirements for Ultra Graphics (4K at 60fps)
| Processor | Intel Core i7-12700K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D |
| RAM | 16 GB (dual-channel mode) |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (12GB) or AMD RX 7900XTX (24GB) |
| Storage | 65 GB available storage |
| OS | Windows 10, Windows 11 with DirectX 12 |
Our Test Bench
We tested Star Wars Outlaws on the newly launched AMD Ryzen 7 9700X which is built on the Zen 5 architecture and comes with 8 cores and 16 threads. The processor has a base clock speed of 3.8GHz and a boost of 5.5GHz. It also gets a 32MB L3 cache. This chip is cooled using the Antec Vortex 360 AIO.
For this performance piece, the 9700X sits on the MSI X670E Gaming Plus WiFi which has a very unique finish that sets it apart from most of the other boards in the market. The board can run the latest Ryzen 9000 series of chips, as well as Ryzen 8000 and 7000. It comes with all the bells and whistles like an extended heatsink design, support for DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0 slot, and a wide array of I/O ports, one of which also includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C port.
Gigabyte’s GeForce RTX 4070 Windforce handles the graphics duties with 12GB VRAM, which should suffice Outlaws’ hunger. These were accompanied by Kingston’s Fury Renegade 48GB non-binary RAM sticks running at 5600MT/s.
Storage duties were handled by the WD Black SN850X, which is known to be one of the best gaming SSD options in the market. The game was run on the MSI G274F, a 180Hz 1080p gaming monitor. With all that out of the way, let’s talk business.
Star Wars Outlaws PC Graphics Settings and Features
The game gives you the option to enable or disable chromatic aberration, film grain, set the depth of field, motion blur intensity, switch to a high contrast mode, and more. You can also manually tweak the texture, detail, and raytracing qualities. The best part about all this is that Ubisoft also gives you a little panel on the right side of the setting that consists of an explainer. This is great for folks who want to get an idea of what they are getting themselves (and their systems) into.
With that out of the way, Star Wars Outlaws has support for upscaling trickeries such as Nvidia DLSS 3.5, AMD FSR 3, Intel XeSS, and the usual temporal anti-aliasing. You also get frame generation on both Nvidia (provided you are on RTX 40 series) and AMD cards, and you’ll certainly need this if you are looking to play at higher settings.
PC-exclusive settings such as Ray Reconstruction and RTX Direct Lighting can also be found. The former is an AI model that essentially tries to enhance how ray-traced lighting and reflections look in the final render, while also lowering the hit on performance. The latter basically replaces all of the game’s direct lighting and makes it more realistic. But, this will require an RTX 4070 or higher because of how demanding it can get.
The game offers graphics quality, ranging from Low, Medium, High, and Ultra. But, there’s another preset that’s purely meant for high-end components. This is similar to what we have seen in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The setting is called “Outlaw” and to enable this go to Ubisoft Connect >Star Wars Outlaws > Properties > Game launch arguments and type in the following command: -unlockmaxsettings. Then, hit save and launch the game.
Star Wars Outlaws PC Performance
Star Wars Outlaws misses out on a built-in benchmark tool, which was disappointing considering we had one in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which is developed by the same folks at Massive Entertainment and uses the Snowdrop Engine. So, to test the performance, I wandered around Toshara’s Mirogana Market, a densely populated area with locals and a lot of indoor lighting, giving us a good idea of how RTX Direct lighting will come into play.
The game has been tested across all settings (except for outlaw) with frame generation, direct lighting, and upscaling enabled and disabled. We have used Nvidia DLSS with the quality set to “Balanced” and the mode set to “Fixed”. For the rest, we have used temporal anti-aliasing. The tables below will give you average fps, 0.2%, and 1% lows as well.
| Tested Indoors (Mirogana Market) | |||||
| Preset | Upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction settings | RTX Direct Lighting | Average fps | Average 1% low fps | Average 0.2% low fps |
| Low | Everything On | Low | 141 fps | 104 fps | 90 fps |
| Low | Everything Off | Disabled | 114 fps | 82 fps | 76 fps |
| Medium | Everything On | Medium | 128 fps | 100 fps | 93 fps |
| Medium | Everything Off | Disabled | 112 fps | 83 fps | 76 fps |
| High | Everything On | High | 101 fps | 83 fps | 81 fps |
| High | Everything Off | Disabled | 103 fps | 72 fps | 67 fps |
| Ultra | Everything On | Ultra | 89 fps | 66 fps | 59 fps |
| Ultra | Everything Off | Disabled | 101 fps | 71 fps | 63 fps |
Star Wars Outlaws had a bunch of problems with frame generation and RTX Direct Lighting in its preview version, but all these have been sorted out in the current version. That said, I did come across certain situations where the lighting flickered quite a few times when RTXDI was enabled. Besides this, you’ll also find the usual artefacts accompanying upscaling, thankfully this is only prominent when you are roaming around on your speeder on the open map.
Star Wars Outlaws is an out-and-about GPU-bound game with the RTX 4070 used at 99% at “High” and “Ultra” settings. The Ryzen 7 9700X was being used at around 62% with the wattage reaching around 87.1 in the “Low” preset. With everything enabled and “Ultra” preset, this number reached around 41% and 78W, respectively. If you feed the game enough memory, it will use this to its advantage, as we saw about 20GB RAM being used.
While the game drank up around 9GB of VRAM in the initial presets, with the “Ultra” settings we saw it demanding about 11.25GB of VRAM which is very close to maxing out. The average 0.2% fps readings here show us that the game does not go through any major stuttering or laggy moments that could hinder your gameplay. This is more evident with the preset set to “High”, which has returned us 83 and 81 fps of average 1% and 0.2% lows, respectively. Things get a bit more spicy with “Ultra” settings, as we see a dip in the numbers.
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Tested in the Open World (Jaunta’s Hope) |
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| Preset | Upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction settings | RTX Direct Lighting | Average fps | Average 1% low fps | Average 0.2% low fps |
| Ultra | Everything Off | Enabled | 74 fps | 44 fps | 42 fps |
| Ultra | Everything Off | Disabled | 121 fps | 86 fps | 80 fps |
| Ultra | Everything On | Disabled | 143 fps | 104 fps | 94 fps |
The above table gives you an idea of how much RTXDI alone can impact the numbers. This was tested on Toshara moon itself, but while riding the speeder around Jaunta’s Hope. While RTXDI does make the shadows smoother and more realistic, and also adds a lot of intricate details with different lighting zones of the game, it comes with a performance hit, especially when you climb the ladder of settings. If visual fidelity with really good lighting and accurate shadows are of the utmost importance to you, and you have the components to support it, you can enable this setting. If not, I doubt the performance hit is actually worth it.
Should You Buy Star Wars Outlaws on PC?
Star Wars Outlaws is available in three different editions: Standard – Rs 4,899, Gold – Rs 7,899, and Ultimate – Rs 8,999. These prices are from the listing on Epic Games — sadly, the Ubisoft Connect app does not support regional pricing and instead showcases them in euros.
The game looks gorgeous and offers almost everything a fan of the action-adventure genre craves. While the stealth mode, exploration, and missions are fun — things like Nix’s movement when asking it to attack or distract someone feels a bit jarring since it does not register the input half of the time. Besides, the combat in stealth mode isn’t really, you know, stealthy. That’s a problem since some of the missions come with a “do not get caught” warning sign. What’s great though is that Outlaws is an idiotproof game — it lets you surpass puzzles and complicated locks by dumbing it down.
Overall, it’s a fun game and definitely worth playing if you are invested in the Star Wars franchise since you’ll come across some known faces. The technological advancements in the form of Ray Reconstruction and RTX Direct Lighting are great to have, but only if you have the horsepower to support it.
