Elden Ring has received massively positive critical acclaim overall, but there’s a fly in the ointment on PC, clearly visible if you look at Steam reviews – namely issues around stuttering, but a patch has now been released, and the developer has promised to work ‘constantly’ on improving performance for PC players.
As PC Gamer reports, the day-one patch (v1.02) solved a good deal of stuttering that our sister site encountered pre-release, so definitely improved matters, but there are still jerky frame rates in evidence at times.
A message from Elden Ring’s developer (via the publisher) states that regarding performance-related gremlins like stuttering, “we will be constantly working to improve the game so that it can be played comfortably on various PC environments and platforms.”
Another issue on PC is that of the mouse being overly sensitive, and a fix is also inbound for this; it should arrive in the “near future.”
Furthermore, the developer notes that it is “working on a few other bug fixes” and some further performance improvements to boot, while apologizing for any inconvenience caused to gamers.
Away from the PC, a major fix for the PS5 is being implemented to cure saved games going wrong due to the console being turned off while playing (or in rest mode). Until that patch arrives, PS5 gamers are advised to “please save your game manually by exiting the game regularly” (press the Option button to get the system menu, then select ‘Quit Game’ to save data correctly, the developer notes).
Analysis: Don’t forget your graphics driver, as ever…
Something else worth bearing in mind is that the developer advises that on PC you should ensure that your graphics card driver is fully up-to-date. As with any fresh game release, this is almost certainly going to make a difference (optimizations for new games are often carried out in the very latest drivers from Nvidia and AMD on the run-up to launch day).
Indeed, the dev notes that this move alone may “significantly improve performance” and so it’s well worth doing if you haven’t already.
Let’s hope the rest of the frame rate fixing comes at speed, because the stuttering can reportedly be very bad in some cases, with PC Gamer describing times when the game dropped to zero fps, meaning Elden Ring was essentially frozen momentarily. That sort of thing can be very jarring, naturally, and even more frustrating in terms of it not necessarily coinciding with heavy activity and lots going on in-game.
Of course, there is some good news on the PC performance front in that Elden Ring’s system requirements aren’t nearly as onerous as we thought they might be…
