Elden Ring in the technology test – ComputerBase

After a long wait, From Software’s Elden Ring is available. ComputerBase analyzed the PC technology of the Soulslike game with many benchmarks. It turns out that even if you hit the 60 FPS FPS cap, it’s the stutter caused by framepacing and cached shading at the start that bothers you the most.

PC gamers have been waiting for Elden Ring for a long time, and now the game from Dark Souls developer From Software has finally arrived. interest in it Soul-like game (of course!) is huge, on Steam the 500,000 concurrently active player mark was easily surpassed at launch. At the same time, the press ratings are incredibly high, the Metacritic score is 95 points (PS5 even 97). Is Elden Ring that good? And technology in particular?

The technology does not match the actual game.

Can technology keep up with the game? The answer should be from the beginning: No! The reason for this is explained below.

The “critique” of technology begins with the graphics. Elden Ring looks decent, but the look is nothing more than average. The game manages to create a very dense atmosphere, which is particularly due to the ambient lighting. Other than that, it’s just mediocre. Animations, level of detail, vegetation, forecast: nothing particularly stands out positively or negatively. On the other hand, the aggressive working LOD is annoying as it constantly lets objects, preferably vegetation, appear out of nowhere in front of the player.

From Software has implemented Elden Ring with an internal engine that also powered Dark Souls 3, for example. DirectX 12 is used as an exclusive API. However, modern features like ray tracing are not available, the same applies to AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS. Ray tracing should show up in game later on. There is no date yet.

There is no more than 60 FPS. Does not matter how.

On PC, Elden Ring offers an annoying limitation: no more than 60 FPS is supported, the game constantly forces 60 Hz, including VSync. And at the latest in times of many monitors with 144 Hz or even higher refresh rates, this is not only annoying, but also incomprehensible. A modern title simply needs to be transferred to PC in such a way that frame rates above 60 FPS are possible without any issues. The days when higher FPS can cause problems should end in 2022.

There’s also no easy way to disable the 60fps cap, as there is in some games by simply making the screen act faster. In Elden Ring it is apparently more rooted, a writable config file is missing. Although there is already a first tool that removes the brakes, this technological test does not go that far.

The Elden Ring graphics menu on PC only runs the bare minimum program, there are nothing more than individual graphics presets and graphics options. Well, an FPS limiter is not necessary with a maximum of 60 frames per second, but other than that there are no comfort features. For example, there is no upsampling or downsampling. There are also no example screenshots or descriptions of the individual functions.

Four graphics presets with minor differences.

With “Maximum”, “High”, “Medium” and “Low”, Elden Ring offers four different graphical presets, where “Maximum” also represents full graphical details. The optical difference between “Maximum” and “High” is small in the photos, you almost have to look for it with a magnifying glass. On “High”, some objects no longer show any ambient occlusion, so this mainly affects vegetation. On the move, however, flickering shadows are sometimes noticeable, yet to be seen at the maximum preset.

So significantly more graphics quality is lost with the medium preset. The main difference is again mainly ambient occlusion, which appears to be almost completely off, making the graphics look rather flat. Apart from that, the texture sharpness is visibly reduced, otherwise there are hardly any differences in the image. What the images hide and the real problem with “Medium” is: The shadows are out of control. The flickering shadows that occasionally appear at the high setting are constant at “medium”, so they almost look like a graphical glitch. This means that the medium preset cannot be used unless the shadow quality is manually raised again.

Texture sharpness again suffers at the low preset and surface detail is also lost. The flickering shadows finish again, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

Below average adjustment potential

Elden Ring’s tuning potential is below average. High instead of maximum detail level doesn’t bring much performance, the GeForce RTX 3060 then increases by 13 percent, the Radeon RX 6600 XT by 12 percent. Switching to the medium preset brings a comparable step, with which the Nvidia graphics card increases by 14 percent more and the AMD counterpart by 15 percent.

However, keep in mind that the shadows look very bad from the medium level of graphics. Increasing the shadow quality also reduces the performance gain. The low preset brings a greater boost of 25 or 20 percent.

The FPS jumps shown make it clear that the frame rate in Elden Ring can only be increased to a limited extent via graphics presets, at least not without massively reducing image quality.