Elden Ring in Technology Test – ComputerBase

After a long wait, From Elden Ring exited the program. ComputerBase looked at Soulslike PC technology with many criteria. It turns out that even if the 60fps FPS limit is reached, the stutter caused by frame spacing and shader buffering at first is the most annoying.

PC gamers have been waiting for Elden Ring for a long time, and now the game from developer Dark Souls From Software has finally arrived. The interest in Soulslike (of course!) is huge, as the 500,000 concurrently active players mark on Steam was easily crossed at first. At the same time, the ratings of journalists are incredibly high, and the Metacritic score is 95 points (PS5 up to 97). Is Elden Ring that good? And what about technology in particular?

Technology does not match the actual game

Can technology keep up with the game? The answer must be correct at first: No! The reason for this is explained below.

The “criticism” of technology begins with graphics. Elden Ring looks decent, but the look is nothing more than average. The game managed to create a very dense atmosphere, which is especially due to the mood lighting. Regardless, it is average. Animation, level of detail, vegetation, insight: nothing stands out positively or negatively. On the other hand, the LOD level is annoying, as it constantly allows things, preferably plants, to appear out of nowhere in front of the player.

From Software has implemented Elden Ring with an internal engine that also powers Dark Souls 3, for example. DirectX 12 is used as an exclusive API. However, modern features such as ray tracing are not available, and the same is true for AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS. Ray tracing should arrive in the game later. No date yet.

No more than 60 frames per second. It doesn’t matter how.

On PC, Elden Ring introduces annoying limitations: 60+ frames per second isn’t supported, and the game constantly forces 60Hz including VSync. And at the latest times many monitors have 144Hz or even higher refresh rates, this is not only annoying, but also incomprehensible. The recent title must simply be transferred to the computer in such a way that frame rates above 60 frames per second are possible without any problems. The days when FPS can cause problems should end in 2022.

There’s also no easy way to disable the 60fps overlay, as in some games it’s just by making the screen run faster. In Elden Ring it appears to be rooted more deeply, the adjustable config file is missing. Although there is already a first tool for brake removal, this technology test does not go that far.

Elden Ring’s graphics menu on PC only runs a minimal amount of software, nothing more than graphics presets and individual graphics options. Well, the FPS limiter is not necessary with a maximum of 60fps, but apart from that there are no rest functions. For example, there is no shorthand or shorthand. There are also no examples of screenshots or descriptions of individual jobs.

Four graphic presets with slight differences

With Maximum, High, Medium, and Low, Elden Ring offers four different graphics presets, with Maximum also representing the full graphic details. The visual difference between “Maximum” and “High” is small in the pictures, you almost have to look for it with a magnifying glass. At the “elevation”, few objects no longer show any obstruction in the surrounding environment, which mainly affects the vegetation. However, during movement, flickering shadows are sometimes noticeable, which have not yet been seen with the maximum preset.

Then graphics quality loses noticeably with the average preset. The main difference again is the surrounding blockage, which appears to be almost completely broken, making the graphics look somewhat flat. Apart from that, the sharpness of the texture is visibly reduced, otherwise there are hardly any differences in the image. What the pictures hide and the real problem with Medium is: Shadows are out of control. The blinking shadows that sometimes appear with the high setting are so consistent with “medium” that it almost looks like a graphic error. This means that the middle preset cannot be used unless the Shadow Quality is turned on again manually.

Then the texture’s sharpness is affected again with the low preset, and the surface detail is also lost. Blinking shadows are on top again, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

Below average tuning potential

Elden Ring tuning capabilities are below average. The high level instead of the maximum detail does not bring much performance, then the GeForce RTX 3060 increases by 13 percent, and the Radeon RX 6600 XT by 12 percent. Switching to the middle preset leads to a similar step, as the Nvidia graphics card increases by another 14 percent, and the corresponding AMD increases by 15 percent.

However, it must be borne in mind that the shadows look very poor from the average level of graphics. Increasing the quality of the shadows also reduces the performance increase. Then the lower preset brings in a 25 or 20 percent higher boost.

The FPS jumps shown show that the frame rate in Elden Ring can only be increased to a limited extent with graphics presets – at least not without dramatically reducing image quality.