Here are our tips to help you set up the best settings possible for optimal Elden Ring PC performance.
Elden Ring reviewers reveal performance issues on PC
Elden Ring reviews are out since February 23, and several reviewers pointed out the game has PC performance issues, with slowdowns most notably in the open world. This led to the Elden Ring community banding together and analyzing the game's settings menu, to try and see what could be optimized. There are several ways to try and optimize the settings yourself. Using review information in Japanese, French, and English, I've made a list below of the graphical settings you could try.
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Elden Ring best graphical settings on PC for optimal performance as of release
- Texture Quality: Medium
- Antialiasing Quality: Medium
- SSAO: Medium
- Depth of Field: Medium
- Motion Blur*
- Shadow Quality: Maximum
- Lightning Quality: Maximum
- Effects Quality: Maximum
- Volumetric Quality: Maximum
- Reflection Quality: Maximum
- Water Surface Quality: High
- Shader Quality: High
- Global Illumination Quality: High
- Grass Quality: Medium
These should be the best settings to minimize FPS drops, assuming your PC meets the game's official minimum requirements in the first place. Motion Blur is up to preference, I personally don't like it at all.
If you have a PC with the recommended requirements or even exceed them, you should try setting some of these options, most notably Texture Quality, at maximum. And see if it affects performance. If the game doesn't slow down even after that then you should keep these changes.
Will the Elden Ring day one patch improve PC performance?
An Elden Ring day one patch was announced, but the patch notes do not mention PC optimization. If you're still having slowdown issues even with the settings above, you should try and lower each setting even more. If it still doesn't solve the issue you'll sadly have to wait for a patch. Getting the game on consoles instead of PC is one solution too.
Update: Game stuttering issue
Several players are reporting in the Steam customer reviews that the stuttering issue is happening regardless of your in-game graphical settings. However, I've also spoken with French Elden Ring PC players who did not encounter any freezes or game stuttering. So it's unclear what triggers the issue right now.
However, it's also important to note that Dark Souls 3 at release on PC had a similar issue. It was since then fixed and patched. Hopefully, FromSoftware will patch this issue for Elden Ring too. The situation is a bit worrying though seeing as of now, FromSoftware hasn't communicated on this stuttering issue at all.