Laurence Malcom
While Elden Ring used to have many issues on PC, the version on Steam Deck now runs much smoother and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais has shared how to fix gaming laptop issues with the game.
At launch, one of the biggest issues that those who chose to play Elden Ring on PC faced was with frame rate and stutter. As I mentioned Eurogamer, Its “working theory” was, “We were looking at another PC game that had shader compilation issues: split-second pauses whenever a new visual effect appeared.”
This is a much bigger problem to solve on a PC as the range of hardware specs on systems is obviously much larger than what’s on a console. Using the same thought process, Steam Deck also has “an advantage, because it’s a fixed piece of hardware, just like a console.”
“On the Linux/Proton side, we have a very extensive pre-shader system with multiple source level levels and binary cache representations that are pre-seeded and shared across users,” Griffais said. “On the deck, we take this to the next level, since we have a very unique GPU/driver set to target, and most shaders that you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure. When the game is trying to release a shader set With the graphics API of your choice, these are usually skipped, as we find the precompiled cache entry on the disk.
“The stutter from the Shader pipeline isn’t the majority of big hurdles we’ve seen in that game. The last example we highlighted has more to do with the game creating thousands of resources like command stores at certain points, which made our memory manager go overclocked to try and deal with it We store these customizations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a lot.
“I can’t comment on whether this is the problem the game is having on other platforms as well, but we’ve been playing on the Deck with all of these in place and the experience has been very smooth.”
as shown In a video from Digital Foundry, “Using a combination of a medium quality preset with strategically enhanced high settings (textures and anti-aliasing) along with medium to low shading quality reduction (doesn’t seem to make any difference to the visuals) and a Valve system engaging level 30 fps and so on. Ours is a virtual 720p rendering of the PlayStation 4 version of Elden Ring.”
Another advantage of Steam Deck is that “because the Valve 30fps cover delivers up to 33.3ms of frame times – as opposed to the software’s internal clock-based solution – you get a much smoother experience.”
For more information on Elden Ring performance, check out our review of how to play it on PS5 vs Xbox Series X/S.
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Adam Pankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter Tweet embed and on Twitch.
