Elden Ring optimization guide: Best settings for optimal performance

Elden Ring has come a long way since its release back in early 2022. However, despite the multitude of title updates and hotfixes, the PC port of FromSoftware's open-world magnum opus is still in a rough shape, especially for mid-range users. While yes, the game has improved a lot since its launch, it's still far from what PC players would consider ideal.

The biggest issue that has been plaguing Elden Ring's PC port since release is stuttering, which still seems to be persistent on some levels. Fortunately, with a little tweaking around with the graphics settings and making intelligent changes, you can get the game running at a smooth 60fps with little to no hitching or stuttering.

Here's a comprehensive optimization guide for Elden Ring, including settings that you should use for the best performance on a range of mid- to entry-level PCs.

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Optimized settings for Elden Ring on PC

First things first, Elden Ring's graphics settings are basically identical to Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, with the only exception being the ray-tracing toggle. The options that have the biggest performance impact in the game are Texture Quality, Shadows Quality, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, and Lighting Quality.

I tested the game out on a RX6600XT GPU paired with a Ryzen 5 5600 CPU, coupled with 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Additionally, the title was installed on a Gen4 NVMe drive. That being said, here are the optimized settings that should give you a smooth 60fps gameplay experience without compromising on the visuals:

• Texture Quality: High
• Antialiasing Quality: High
• SSAO: Medium
• Depth of Field: On (Personal preference)
• Motion Blur: On (Personal preference)
• Shadow Quality: Medium
• Lighting Quality: High
• Effects Quality: High
• Volumetric Quality: Medium (or High, if you have 8GB or more VRAM)
• Reflection Quality: High
• Water Surface Quality: High
• Shader Quality: High
• Global Illumination Quality: Medium
• Grass Quality: High

As for ray tracing, unless you're using a high-end Nvidia RTX card, akin to something like RTX 3070, RTX 3080Ti, RTX 4070 and above, or AMD's latest RX 7800XT and above, stick to keeping it disabled. Given there are no RT reflections, with the effect being relegated to global illumination and shadows only, you won't be losing out on much.

Elden Ring essentially runs on a modified version of FromSoftware's proprietary game engine, which the studio has been using for almost every single title since Bloodborne. However, with Elden Ring and later Armored Core 6 Fires of Rubicon, the studio switched to a DirectX 12 base for the engine, which helped enable support for features like ray tracing.

However, using DirectX 12 also came with the cost of the game relying on shader pre-compilation for every new texture and alpha effect. However, since it doesn't have a dedicated shader pre-compilation, letting the game do it while it streams textures in real time, introduced stuttering.

Fortunately, FromSoftware did address most of these issues in their latest title, Armored Core 6, which is essentially the best PC port that has come from the studio after Dark Souls 2 Scholars of the First Sin, obviously. Elden Ring did get most of the stuttering and shader compilation issues rectified via the numerous title updates.

However, there's still a bit more work that's left to be done, especially with the highly anticipated DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree on the horizon.