Running Elden Ring, especially on weak computers, can be frustrating with instability of the game and a sharp drop in frame rate. First of all, it is important to note that many of the problems are not related to your system. Unfortunately, the rich development experience of From Software does not help the studio to release stable projects. For the release the authors released patch 1.02, in which they promised to fix the unexpected fps drop at some moments (most often during combat, which is very uncomfortable for soulslike games). But, unfortunately, they didn’t do their job. Nevertheless, we can look at what graphics settings are present in Elden Ring, as well as understand what can be disabled for the sake of increasing game performance.
Important: Elden Ring (at least on release) is “locked” at 60 fps. You can only unlock more performance with an unofficial fan patch.
The game was tested on GTX 1060, a popular people’s graphics card. With maximum preset settings, it was possible to get up to 37 fps. High showed 41 fps, medium showed 30% more, and reducing the settings to low was 54% more than at maximum. So on GTX 1060 to get close to 60 fps you need to set the preset to low graphics settings.
Which settings are responsible for what:
- Texture quality: decreasing this parameter from maximum to medium increases the average frame rate by one. Nevertheless, this is the most important parameter for those who want to somehow improve the performance of the game.
- Smoothing quality: it is better to put on a high value of “AA”.
- SSAO: decreasing of this parameter allows to increase performance by 3%, but not to spoil visual style of the game.
- Depth of field: does not affect performance.
- Motion blur: has no effect on performance.
- Shadow quality: do not lower this parameter by any means. If you lower it from the maximum even on weak graphics cards, you will get “disk-trees”. They will lose depth and their branches and leaves will start blinking, affecting your experience of the game.
- Quality of lighting: does not affect the performance, you can leave it at maximum.
- Effects quality: has no effect on performance, you can leave it at maximum.
- Quality of volumetric lighting: leave it at maximum, has no effect on performance.
- Quality of reflections: maximum and medium settings do not give a performance boost, you can leave it at maximum.
- Water surface quality: has no effect on performance.
- Shaders: one of the best settings for those looking for a way to improve performance. Switching from max setting to medium will give you a 3% fps boost.
- Global Illumination Quality: has no effect on performance.
- Grass Quality: this may come as a surprise to you, but it’s also one of the most important settings if you’re looking for a way to get a few more fps. Switching from maximum to medium gives you a 5% fps gain.