If you’re a long-term player of Elden Ring, you may well have been one of those PC gamers who has suffered from micro-stuttering—very brief but large drops in frame rate—throughout. All kinds of solutions have been bandied around the interwebs for it but none have truly nixed the issue. With the long-awaited expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, and a massive 20GB patch to the base game, you may have been hoping that FromSoftware has done something about it—but I’m afraid you’re out of luck.
Elden Ring isn’t a game I’ve been interested in playing before (I’m not keen on any Souls game) but equipped with a preview code for the DLC including the full Elden Ring patch, I dived in hoping to reach the point where I could start performance testing the new region. Entry requirements to the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion were steep. So I had to abandon my attempt and settle on just examining the main regions within Elden Ring to see whether there were still the same issues in the game code.
Still, I should imagine there will be an awful lot of fans either wanting to start the game afresh, having not touched it for a while or are picking it up again determined to get to the point where they might be in with a chance of accessing the lauded new DLC. But if you were hoping that FromSoftware had added things like ultrawide screen support or raised the fps limit, then you’ll be disappointed, as nothing at all has changed in that respect.
As many of you will know, Elden Ring is capped at 60 fps and although one can remove this with an appropriate mod, you run the risk of being booted off FromSoftware’s servers or even being served with a temporary ban. So, to that end, I’ve tested the game ‘as is’ and I’ve only covered two settings: 1080p on Low quality and 4K on Maximum quality.
The reason for that mostly concerns the fact that the frame rate cap is pretty low, so most PC gamers will be able to find a screen resolution and quality settings combination that will run the game just fine.
However, overall performance hasn’t been an issue for most Elden Ring players—the main complaints have always been about stuttering, especially micro-stuttering. This is where the performance very briefly drops by a large margin and in the case of micro-stuttering, it’s so brief that normal benchmarks often don’t pick it up. In real-time gameplay, though, it makes the whole experience feel somewhat detached as if the game is input lagging, even though the frame rate is fine.
Performance Testing and Analysis
I’m using four different platforms (two AMD, two Intel) and a range of graphics cards to see how everything works with the new Shadow of the Erdtree patch. The figures to focus on are the 1% and 0.1% Low values—essentially these numbers are saying that for 99% and 99.9% of the time, the frame rate is greater than those figures. Stuttering can present itself here, resulting in a big gap to the average frame rate.
For the most part, Elden Ring ran fine on each of my test bench machines, except for the Core i7 14700KF setup. That one stutters so badly I thought there might be something wrong with the PC, but no other game runs like that on it and a deeper analysis shows there to be no obvious issue with the PC itself.
To show you what I mean by how bad the stuttering is, here’s a graph of recorded frame times (how long it takes between two successive frame presents) for the Core i7 14700KF and RTX 4080 Super PC. A game running at a constant 60 fps should produce a flat line around the 17 milliseconds region but you can see major spikes everywhere, some as high as 100 milliseconds, just from running around the open world.
The other Intel PC, and the two AMD systems, didn’t show anything as bad as this, regardless of what GPU was used. There were still occasional dips but nothing that would make you want to throw your controller across the room.