Elden Ring PC Performance Thread | You see that mountain? You can stutter there.

ThatOneGuy · Apr 17, 2022

Still holding off on this. I keep dipping into this thread to see if performance has been ironed out, sad to hear it hasn't improved greatly for a lot of people. I really don't want to get the ps4 version on my ps5, that's an insane workaround for a company this big, they should do better.

Afro · Apr 17, 2022

I fixed my intermittent frame drops by using image scaling in Geforce Experience and dropping the res down to 2176x1224 from 1440p. I tested both resolutions at a specific marker on the map that gave me bad frame drops every single time when moving the camera, and the frame drops disappeared when using the slightly lower resolution.

This obviously doesn't solve 100% of the stutter, but it helped me keep a more consistent, locked 60 fps at least.

This is with a 5800x / 3070 rig, sadly.

Jedi2016 · Apr 17, 2022

Since the problems with the game's performance don't really have much to do with GPU power or any of the usual suspects, I'm half expecting the raytracing patch to not actually have much of a hit to performance if you've got a decent RTX GPU, especially if we're still running at the 60fps cap.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

dadoes said:
I beat the game at 150 hours and I only had minor issues.

It's a great game on PC. Don't let the issues reported here deter you from getting the game. Not everybody experiences these problems and people who don't have issues tend not to post.

I'm 150 hours into my first PC playthrough, and I've had very, very minor issues.

There is occasional, minor stutter here and there as new areas load or fps drops during certain effects like any mist stuff or certain spells and things.

But it is complete playable and is a very functional port in my experience.

It's also one of the best games I have ever played.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

Anomander said:
How can I unlock the fps using Special K while keeping the HDR on? Seems like it only works in Borderless Windowed mode.

I'd use flawless widescreen to unlock the fps instead if you want fullscreen.

Special K requires borderless windowed for fps unlock.

99humanity · Apr 17, 2022

dadoes said:
I beat the game at 150 hours and I only had minor issues.

It's a great game on PC. Don't let the issues reported here deter you from getting the game. Not everybody experiences these problems and people who don't have issues tend not to post.

Even having more than minor issues (the game freezing + catching up to itself actually killed me a few times), it's far enough between that I would never recommend NOT playing the game because of it. Like yeah it sucks but it's also fine 90% of the time and what's the alternative? Not playing the game or playing it on PS4, where my PC will look and perform (90% of the time) a lot better, no thanks

Gitaroo · Apr 17, 2022

redflamingolingo said:
I'd use flawless widescreen to unlock the fps instead if you want fullscreen.

Special K requires borderless windowed for fps unlock.

Is playing offline alone safe to use flawless wide-screen without tinkering with the exe files?

Ra · Apr 17, 2022

I installed the Better Poise mod, which makes it so when you are wearing heavy armor enemies can't stagger you with basic light attacks.

The game feels so much better and far fairer like this. The basic ass foot soldiers shouldn't be knocking you out of attack animations with their weakest strikes when I have 60+ poise. In the vanilla game all enemy light attacks do 50 poise damage and heavy attacks do 100, who thought that was a good idea?

I'm loving the mod scene for this game.

Anomander · Apr 17, 2022

redflamingolingo said:
I'd use flawless widescreen to unlock the fps instead if you want fullscreen.

Special K requires borderless windowed for fps unlock.

Yeah but doesn't Special K offer some fixes and performance benefits?

Igniz12 · Apr 17, 2022

Ra said:
I installed the Better Poise mod, which makes it so when you are wearing heavy armor enemies can't stagger you with basic light attacks.

The game feels so much better and far fairer like this. The basic ass foot soldiers shouldn't be knocking you out of attack animations with their weakest strikes when I have 60+ poise. In the vanilla game all enemy light attacks do 50 poise damage and heavy attacks do 100, who thought that was a good idea?

I'm loving the mod scene for this game.

Is there a breakdown of this? Would love to read up on how the game handles poise. I thought it was just using the active poise system from DS3 but those poise numbers sound ridiculous if true.

rashbeep · Apr 17, 2022

Ra said:
I installed the Better Poise mod, which makes it so when you are wearing heavy armor enemies can't stagger you with basic light attacks.

The game feels so much better and far fairer like this. The basic ass foot soldiers shouldn't be knocking you out of attack animations with their weakest strikes when I have 60+ poise. In the vanilla game all enemy light attacks do 50 poise damage and heavy attacks do 100, who thought that was a good idea?

I'm loving the mod scene for this game.

there really should have been some way to upgrade torrent too, combat on him is really annoying by how easily he is staggered

Slaythe · Apr 17, 2022

redflamingolingo said:
I'm 150 hours into my first PC playthrough, and I've had very, very minor issues.

There is occasional, minor stutter here and there as new areas load or fps drops during certain effects like any mist stuff or certain spells and things.

But it is complete playable and is a very functional port in my experience.

It's also one of the best games I have ever played.

????

Weren't you using fan mods though ???

CrocM · Apr 17, 2022

Ra said:
I installed the Better Poise mod, which makes it so when you are wearing heavy armor enemies can't stagger you with basic light attacks.

The game feels so much better and far fairer like this. The basic ass foot soldiers shouldn't be knocking you out of attack animations with their weakest strikes when I have 60+ poise. In the vanilla game all enemy light attacks do 50 poise damage and heavy attacks do 100, who thought that was a good idea?

I'm loving the mod scene for this game.

That was a strange design choice, although I don't have a fully formed opinion on whether its good or not. It could be that they tested it and being able to poise through attacks made it too easy given the arsenal of offensive options (especially for mages).

A swipe from an enemy with a dagger does like 50 poise damage while the same attack from the player does like 10. Very odd.

Caspar · Apr 17, 2022

ThatOneGuy said:
Still holding off on this. I keep dipping into this thread to see if performance has been ironed out, sad to hear it hasn't improved greatly for a lot of people. I really don't want to get the ps4 version on my ps5, that's an insane workaround for a company this big, they should do better.

I held off until till a couple days ago for the same reason, and honestly I'm really surprised how smooth a time I've had.

Yeah the slow down-speed up thing happens once an hour or so, and there's a small stutter when entering new areas, but the rest of the time it's a locked smooth 60, and I am sensitive to micro stutters and frame pacing issues (still can't play Halo Infinite). No mods or control panel changes, just stuck it on maximum settings and played it.

Most people who aren't getting any major issues aren't likely to be commenting in this thread, so you're probably getting a negative skew on how it generally is.

Night Terror · Apr 17, 2022

I don't understand why people are thinking we're not getting more patches or this is done for? If you check steamdb you'll see the dev and qa branches are very active still.

I guess 1.04 is taking some good work because they're probably checking various stuff that needs proper testing. Let's see what comes out.

BTW, if you're using a Nvidia GPU I'd recommend upping the shader cache size from default (I believe it's 4GB IIRC) to 10 or so. It won't fix stutters, but since stutters are a byproduct of shader compilation, it will help seeing them as often when you revisit areas, since the shaders will already be compiled and the increased size will prevent frequent rewriting. Unsure what options AMD users have available if any.

Yudoken · Apr 17, 2022

Night Terror said:
BTW, if you're using a Nvidia GPU I'd recommend upping the shader cache size from default (I believe it's 4GB IIRC) to 10 or so

It's already debunkt, people posting all sorts of placebo solutions but they won't fix anything.
There are multiple reasons why the game stutters, one of them is the shader cache but the majority of the time it's the "invisible loading" lines which is the worst offender in my playthrough. Either you endure it or try some mods out (or Steam deck where Valve apparently was able to improve some issues).

The worst technical issues I've noticed so far:

Invisible lines in the world which when you go over causes huge stutters and fps drops (easily repeatable and mindblowing that this to this day was never properly addressed, the first patch after launch made it a bit better).

DX12 shader caching stutter and fps drops

Some effects just kill the fps for no reason (e. g. whenever the big plant spores; later in the game when a walking mausoleum was shooting magic caused massive fps drops and it holded that for a while until the attack was finished).
Generally whenever a lot of effects accour the game tends to cripple, I've monitored my pc and the gpu usage can drop down to half, it's just broken).

Some shadows are very broken (I think mostly/only in the snowy region and people say this came with the newest patch).

Many (boss) cutscenes heavily freeze for a second too long whenever the camera transitions to a different angle. It ruins the flow of the cutscene.

Some graphic settings are resetting every time you restart the game (e. g. Anti aliasing and I think depth of field).

Unnessary huge input buffering.

All these issues are both extremely obvious, easy to reproduce (QA easily must've caught that months before launch) and are ignored by From and Bamco which just pathetic and the more time passes the more arrogant they seem ignoring these problems.

These don't go away just because people praise how good the game is despite the massive technicalities faults. We suffer through it.

Night Terror · Apr 17, 2022

Yudoken said:
It's already debunkt, people posting all sorts of placebo solutions but they won't fix anything.

I stated it didn't fix it, simply make it less often when revisiting regions though.

Yudoken said:
Some shadows are very broken (I think mostly/only in the snowy region.

Shadows are broken all over the place now, with Mountaintop being the most exaggerated and noticeable, but I'm seeing weird lines in corners all the time wherasbefore it was not happening.

Yudoken said:
Some graphic settings are resetting every time you restart the game (e. g. Anti aliasing and I think depth of field).

Is this new? I've been playing at max settings for a while now since many weren't improving performance by such a wide margin but I don't recall seeing this before?

Yudoken · Apr 17, 2022

Honestly I've played on max settings most of the time too but whenever I've encountered something that causes massive fps drops I was trying out changing my graphic settings to improve things (most settings don't do much at all).

Starting the snowy parts I've tested more graphic settings out then ever and after restarting the game I've noticed that some settings always go back to max.

Rewind · Apr 17, 2022

Spoit said:
I wish it worked for me. Even with the saturation maxed and brightness minimized, I'm still getting super crushed blacks, and everytthing is washed out like there';s a fog bank between the camera and the character. No matter what I fiddle with, I can't get the same kinds of colors people are screenshotting, even in random tutorial vids, much less the glamor shots.

And yeah, trying to play in SDR is just right out, it's like it's purposefully been ran through a couple desaturation filters

Try these hdr settings:

Leave brightness at 5, put saturation at 6, and put peak brightness to whatever your display is + 100.

Not all displays are made equally for hdr though, depending on what you have it might not look great.

Azai · Apr 17, 2022

Yudoken said:
Honestly I played on max settings most of the time too but whenever I've encountered something that causes massive fps drops I was trying out changing my graphic settings to improve things (most settings don't do much at all).

Starting the snowy parts I especially took notice how broken the shadows were and tried to test more graphic settings out and after lowering settings and restarting the game I've noticed that some settings always go back to max.

They dont because the CPU is the bottleneck in most cases. ( or the system loading new assets)

dark494 · Apr 17, 2022

Gitaroo said:
Is playing offline alone safe to use flawless wide-screen without tinkering with the exe files?

You can only play offline if you use any mod. Not that online even works

Spoit · Apr 17, 2022

Rewind said:
Try these hdr settings:

Leave brightness at 5, put saturation at 6, and put peak brightness to whatever your display is + 100.

Not all displays are made equally for hdr though, depending on what you have it might not look great.

I have a lg cx, so that's basically the default settings, since peak brightness is like 900 ish. Having the brightness that high washes everything out

Rewind · Apr 17, 2022

Spoit said:
I have a lg cx, so that's basically the default settings, since peak brightness is like 900 ish. Having the brightness that high washes everything out

Elden ring's hdr isn't great. The peak brightness of the CX is 800 nits with hgig. If you want something that pops or looks different then you should try Special K. If you lower the default brightness from 5 it will crush the blacks and anything higher will wash them out. I also use a CX.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

Gitaroo said:
Is playing offline alone safe to use flawless wide-screen without tinkering with the exe files?

Yea, it hooks into the game and doesn't modify any of the game files at all.

GiantEnemyCrab · Apr 17, 2022

I just wish to know what's the reason that EAC freezes the game periodically as this seems only to occur on certain systems. I also want to play co-op so going offline is not really an option.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

Slaythe said:
????

Weren't you using fan mods though ???

I use mods for minimal HUD and stuff and for a while I was unlocking framerate, but this was causing massive issues in Liurna. The lake area was all over the place, even with GSYNC, so I just kept the game locked at 60 fps and have been playing this way for the last 70 hours or so.

I also use Special K because I much prefer the HDR implementation, but I didn't use Special K for over half of my playthrough and the game was just fine for me. I've tested with and without Special K at 60 fps, and Special K makes little difference in how the game actually performs now compared to launch.

My mods are mostly cosmetic now. I've settled into 60 fps, but even then there are some drops here and there, ESPECIALLY when there are a lot of effects like huge plant spores and magic, etc on the screen.

Otherwise, I only had big frame drops during one boss fight in Siofra area, but no hard freezes or anything of that sort.

I play offline and have been having a blast.

GiantEnemyCrab · Apr 17, 2022

redflamingolingo said:
I'm 150 hours into my first PC playthrough, and I've had very, very minor issues.

There is occasional, minor stutter here and there as new areas load or fps drops during certain effects like any mist stuff or certain spells and things.

But it is complete playable and is a very functional port in my experience.

It's also one of the best games I have ever played.

If you play offline, yeah, but that's missing a significant chunk of the game.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

Rewind said:
Elden ring's hdr isn't great. The peak brightness of the CX is 800 nits with hgig. If you want something that pops or looks different then you should try Special K. If you lower the default brightness from 5 it will crush the blacks and anything higher will wash them out. I also use a CX.

Special K HDR is INSANE. It really takes this game to a new level.

Highly recommended.

redflamingolingo · Apr 17, 2022

GiantEnemyCrab said:
If you play offline, yeah, but that's missing a significant chunk of the game.

I can do without the cringe, rape joke messages. I don't need help from other players, but I really, really do miss helping other players in their games.

Like, a lot. And I also am running low on rune arcs, so I'm kinda thinking I'm going to have to ditch some of the mods at some point to farm rune arcs.

But yea, I hate the messages this time around. All I needed was to see 3 rape jokes in the room with Sorceress Sellen pierced to a wall on her knees.

Pass. Complete immersion killer.

Freshmaker · Apr 17, 2022

ThatOneGuy said:
Still holding off on this. I keep dipping into this thread to see if performance has been ironed out, sad to hear it hasn't improved greatly for a lot of people. I really don't want to get the ps4 version on my ps5, that's an insane workaround for a company this big, they should do better.

Mine evened out after a clean Windows 10 install.

Butch · Apr 17, 2022

dadoes said:
I beat the game at 150 hours and I only had minor issues.

It's a great game on PC. Don't let the issues reported here deter you from getting the game. Not everybody experiences these problems and people who don't have issues tend not to post.

I didn't have any issue, 70 hours in. No stuttering after the first patch came out, no crashes, getting 60fps with almost everything maxed out at 4k on my 3070. Didn't use any unnoficial patch either.

Afro said:
I fixed my intermittent frame drops by using image scaling in Geforce Experience and dropping the res down to 2176x1224 from 1440p. I tested both resolutions at a specific marker on the map that gave me bad frame drops every single time when moving the camera, and the frame drops disappeared when using the slightly lower resolution.

This obviously doesn't solve 100% of the stutter, but it helped me keep a more consistent, locked 60 fps at least.

This is with a 5800x / 3070 rig, sadly.

See, this is totally different from my experience, I think I'm an outlier on this one. I can get 60fps locked at 1440p with my 3070 and 5600X, everything maxed out, no frame drops.

dm101 · Apr 17, 2022

I'm 140 hours in, and roughly one crash every other session I fire up. Some stutters here and there as well, but overall I'm happy with it. I'm having a blast taking my time with the game.

AnimeJesus · Apr 17, 2022

I've been enjoying the game for 300+ hours. Locking the framerate to 40 early on made this game much more enjoyable with a consistent framerate.

The only annoying technical issue that still happens, not too frequently but it's really annoying when it does, is that the game will freeze for a second or two and then resume and speed up for a bit.

For the most part it seems to be completely random, I'll play for hours without encountering then it will just start happening for a bit. Some areas where it has happened, it doesn't happen again consistently.

Not sure what it is but it can be pretty frustrating, and I hoped it would be patched by now. I wonder if it's something with being online?

Ra · Apr 17, 2022

Igniz12 said:
Is there a breakdown of this? Would love to read up on how the game handles poise. I thought it was just using the active poise system from DS3 but those poise numbers sound ridiculous if true.

Poise | Elden Ring Wiki and the mod page Better Poise at Elden Ring Nexus should give you the full picture.

rashbeep said:
there really should have been some way to upgrade torrent too, combat on him is really annoying by how easily he is staggered

I hardly fight from Torrent at all, Colossal weapon combat feels so much worse than just being on foot, and yeah the poise breaks are so terrible.

CrocM said:
That was a strange design choice, although I don't have a fully formed opinion on whether its good or not. It could be that they tested it and being able to poise through attacks made it too easy given the arsenal of offensive options (especially for mages).

A swipe from an enemy with a dagger does like 50 poise damage while the same attack from the player does like 10. Very odd.

I'm still testing it for a bit. The standard version of the mod just halves the light/heavy attacks from 50/100 to 25/50. It hasn't felt broken so far but I need to fight an actual boss still.

There is also an optional file that ridiculously drops it to 25% (13/25) but that is obviously broken and would make even mage/light armor be able to tank a few hits.

En-ou · Apr 17, 2022

Anyone figured out the specific reason why only some have the stutters? 200 plus hours and I've had none of those.

MrCJ86 · Apr 17, 2022

En-ou said:
Anyone figured out the specific reason why only some have the stutters? 200 plus hours and I've had none of those.

Mine was related to old installed versions of game pass games, once I uninstalled them I only have shader related stutters not the constant random long pauses the game pass installs where causing. Night and day experience.

Freshmaker · Apr 17, 2022

En-ou said:
Anyone figured out the specific reason why only some have the stutters? 200 plus hours and I've had none of those.

I suspect mine was due to taking a drive that was from an Intel system then slapping that into an AMD one.

Ra · Apr 17, 2022

Looking deeper down the mod scene rabbit hole, I think everyone should take a look at EMU Light (Enhanced Moveset Utility).

It's a control customization tool that doesn't require offline play, the biggest thing I noticed is that it allows separation of the dodges and sprint to exclusive keys or controller buttons. I'm about to mess with setting it up right now.

I also found a 'skip intro logos' and one that disables the camera recenter from the enemy targeting key. God is real.

En-ou said:
Anyone figured out the specific reason why only some have the stutters? 200 plus hours and I've had none of those.

No idea. I have a modern but lower-midrange laptop 2021 system (10nm Tiger Lake i5-11260H 6c/12t CPU + RTX 3050 Ti) and I only had the hitching once in Siofra River Well.

I'm running the game offline and with a framerate unlocker though so my experience is not the norm.

Premium Ghoul · Apr 18, 2022

There's a good mod that expands the UI to fit ultrawide (and wider) screens for those that want it. Originally this mod required you to extract the game files which doubled the install size, but now it works with a mod loader.

Ultrawide UI Fixes

Fixes every single issue with the UI on ultrawide monitors.-- For game version: 1.08.1 --

www.nexusmods.com

Kalik · Apr 18, 2022

Jedi2016 said:
Since the problems with the game's performance don't really have much to do with GPU power or any of the usual suspects, I'm half expecting the raytracing patch to not actually have much of a hit to performance if you've got a decent RTX GPU, especially if we're still running at the 60fps cap.

I'm curious what RT features will be enabled- shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion?

Freshmaker · Apr 18, 2022

Kalik said:
I'm curious what RT features will be enabled- shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion?

Whatever the PS5 could reasonably handle I'm betting. So not much.

Kalik · Apr 18, 2022

Freshmaker said:
Whatever the PS5 could reasonably handle I'm betting. So not much.

so no chance of From Software delivering a superior PC version?

Slaythe · Apr 18, 2022

Who needs RT with graphics these good ?

On a serious note, the game is currently in a state where you have to downgrade graphics to avoid the multiple glitches and perf issues, so expecting them to deliver anything decent in that regards is kind of preposterous, at this point.

cvbas · Apr 19, 2022

1.04 just dropped.

whiskeyjack-YT · Apr 19, 2022

DLSS when? Itching for ng+ like mad

Shinobido Heart · Apr 19, 2022

Downloading a 884MB update on Steam, wonder what it could be!

XBlade · Apr 19, 2022

They fixed most the flickering shadows in the moutaintops. Only a few strange ones here and there.

cvbas · Apr 19, 2022

Patch notes:

ELDEN RING: Patch Notes 1.04

ELDEN RING Notice of Update Distribution – Version 1.04 We are distributing an update to improve the stability of gameplay and to adjust balance. We apologize for the inconvenience, but please apply the latest update before you enjoy the game.

en.bandainamcoent.eu

Nothing specific about the PC version, all we got was "Other performance improvements and bug fixes".

Shinobido Heart · Apr 19, 2022

I played for a quick 5-10 minutes, it felt like they finally fixed the performance issues on PC.

Still got the occasional stutter though. I'm curious how the performance is for others.

Burgess_101 · Apr 19, 2022

"Increased online multiplayer stability."

Maybe they finally fixed the coop they broke a month ago.

Elden Ring PC Performance Thread | You see that mountain? You can stutter there.

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