Elden Ring PC Stuttering Issues Fixed - But Only on Valve's Steam Deck

[Raevenlord]

Elden Ring launched in late February to rave critic and consumer reviews. The game is an excellent showcase of From Software's gaming design ethos, but ultimately proves that the company's rendering engine still requires work after years of installments due to widely-reported stuttering issues - irrespective of hardware configuration. A fix for Elden Ring's stuttering issues has surfaced on late Monday - courtesy of Valve and its Proton wrapper, and only applicable to the Steam Deck. In a way, this turns Steam Deck into the smoothest device to play Elden Ring on.

The issue with Elden Ring's stuttering has been linked to the games' continuous shader loading. Apparently, Elden Ring allows users to enter its vast open-world without pre-compiling the required shaders (something that we've seen other games do through usually lengthy boot-up processes) for the specific hardware. This forces the game to constantly compile shaders as they're required (due to world loading, animation loading, among other triggers), which is responsible for the stuttering issues gamers on PC have been encountering.





Valve's engineers solved the problem via Proton, the compatibility wrapper that allows games to be played in Linux builds. Since the Steam Deck is pushing the engine's API calls via Vulkan through the Proton wrapper, Valve can itself deploy compiled shaders optimized for Steam Deck at the wrapper level, which prevent the constant shader loading from happening while in-game.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

"WAY TO GO DALLAS!!" ...Ooops I mean Valve.

 

[_Flare]

Doesn´t a usersetting of Shader-Cache "unlimited" in the Nvidias Setting do anything for Team Green?

 

[prtskg]

Will this work in Arch Linux?

 

[elghinnarisa]

Will this work in Arch Linux?

It works because the Deck is one set of hardware, which means that any shaders you compile on one deck works on another, same hardware on all of them. It is not specifically related to one OS or another.

 

[Cutechri]

God Valve, send me my e-mail already. I wanna give you my money and buy this thing.

 

[GoldenX]

Doesn´t a usersetting of Shader-Cache "unlimited" in the Nvidias Setting do anything for Team Green?

That just increases the limit of the cache, you still will have to build shaders on the go.
Blame DirectX12, if the game ran on Vulkan, you could build shaders in parallel using multiple threads.

 

[konga]

That just increases the limit of the cache, you still will have to build shaders on the go.
Blame DirectX12, if the game ran on Vulkan, you could build shaders in parallel using multiple threads.

I'll choose to blame the devs. There are other DX12 games with stuttering, but this is the worst of the bunch by far, and there are also DX12 games that have managed to avoid the problem entirely. I love From Software more than anyone should like a corporation, but they bungled this one.

 

[GoldenX]

Optimizing shader performance is like the rest of the optimizations, comes at the end and with zero budget. Don't blame the devs, blame the management.
Look at some Koei Tecmo games, it can always be worse, far worse.

 

[Dorek]

Not experienced this PC stuttering myself, so not sure whats that all about.

 

[sam_86314]

I wonder if running it under VKD3D-Proton (DX12 to Vulkan translation layer) would affect this issue on Windows at all.

Apparently using DXVK on some DX9 games in Windows can help with stability and performance in some cases.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Not experienced this PC stuttering myself, so not sure whats that all about.

Yes I'm confused, it's running buttery smooth on my 5800X + 2080 super combo at high settings. Not one stutter in 45 hours of gameplay.

 

[Dorek]

Yes I'm confused, it's running buttery smooth on my 5800X + 2080 super combo at high settings. Not one stutter in 45 hours of gameplay.

Yes im also on rtx 2080 and played through the entire game at about 100 hours finish.

 

[mama]

Given some say they have no stuttering issues and others do, can we isolate the issue? I have seen videos and reviews showing clear and major stuttering which has put me off buying the game when normally this would be my cup of tea.

 

[R-T-B]

Blame DirectX12, if the game ran on Vulkan, you could build shaders in parallel using multiple threads.

Pretty sure you can do that in any API if you actually remember to uh... implement it.

 

[GoldenX]

With varying levels of complexity.
If you do it in OpenGL, you are mad.

 

[GrayAx]

Lack of pre-compiled shaders causing issues on pc seems like a fairly common issue for engines originally designed to run on consoles.
I remember Horizon Zero Dawn had the same issue, but 'solved' it by pre-compiling shaders at first startup and while it was on the start menu.

I would have vastly preferred that, leaving the game idling on the main menu for 5-15 min once beats playing it with constant microstuttering.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Doesn´t a usersetting of Shader-Cache "unlimited" in the Nvidias Setting do anything for Team Green?

That means more than 100GB of cache... something is seriously fucked up with the game then. No game needs that much.

 

[Metroid]

I bought the steam version and did not try it yet, I was playing the pirated version few days ago which has no drm and had no stuttering, no issues at all, and I was using a gtx 1070 around 40 fps, did not need to use my 3080. Maybe the issue is the drm?

 

[sam_86314]

I bought the steam version and did not try it yet, I was playing the pirated version few days ago which has no drm and had no stuttering, no issues at all, and I was using a gtx 1070 around 40 fps, did not need to use my 3080. Maybe the issue is the drm?

As far as I know, the game only uses Steam Stub DRM, which is what's built into Steam.

 

[Metroid]

As far as I know, the game only uses Steam Stub DRM, which is what's built into Steam.

If that is the case I wonder why the stuttering, I'm on Windows 11, latest nvidia driver .79 and 32gb of ram, nvme 1gb however the game is on the hdd not on the nvme. This game difficulty is insane, is already too hard without stuttering, imagine with, because a slow screen flash or dropping of a fps in milliseconds might be a disaster in this game, many enemy hits are one shot kill. I would not even play it, not worth the stress.

edit: I also have a 5900x at 4ghz all core underclocked at 1.0v and no issues, 100w.

 

[DonKnotts]

Not experienced this PC stuttering myself, so not sure whats that all about.

Same. I've got around 60-70 hours into the game and haven't seen the stuttering once. Maybe a fast SSD and fast RAM can mostly make it unnoticeable? The only bug I've encountered with Elden ring so far was while trying to exit the game I got stuck in a loop of the game saying something along the lines of "The frame rate is too low for online play, press any button to return to the main menu." Except I was on the main screen at the time trying to get to the main menu to exit the game.

 

[sam_86314]

If that is the case I wonder why the stuttering, I'm on Windows 11, latest nvidia driver .79 and 32gb of ram, nvme 1gb however the game is on the hdd not on the nvme. This game difficulty is insane, is already too hard without stuttering, imagine with, because a slow screen flash or dropping of a fps in milliseconds might be a disaster in this game, many enemy hits are one shot kill. I would not even play it, not worth the stress.

Actually I think the game uses Easy Anti Cheat as well. If you have no interest in the online functions, you can remove that. I've heard it can cause stuttering and other issues.

I always remove anti cheat stuff like that anyway as I am interested in modding and not interested in having a rootkit on my system. I also just want to play single player games any way I want. That includes cheating.

 

[Cheeseball]

I won't deny that others are experiencing stuttering, but I have not run into any issues like that on two systems: The one in my profile at 2160p60 and on a 6900HS with the RX 6700S (1440p60). Both are running smooth as butter and have the game installed on PCI-E 3.0 NVME M.2 drives.

Maybe people are installing it on spinning rust or such?

 

[progste]

I tried the game out of curiosity and I haven't seen any stuttering, it ran pretty fluid on my aging R9 290x at 1080p high settings (which it defaulted to).
In some of the open areas with enemies the fps seem to drop a bit but there is no stuttering.

Ryzen 7 2700x
16 GB @3000Mhz CL16
R9 290x 4GB (AMD legacy drivers)
the game is installed on an SSD