, you may well have been one of those PC gamers who has suffered from micro-stuttering—very brief but large drops in frame rate—throughout. All kinds of solutions have been bandied around the interwebs for it but none have truly nixed the issue. With the long-awaited expansion,, and a massive 20GB patch to the base game, you may have been hoping that FromSoftware has done something about it—but I'm afraid you're out of luck.
As many of you will know, Elden Ring is capped at 60 fps and although one can remove this with an appropriate mod, you run the risk of being booted off FromSoftware's servers or even being served with a temporary ban. So, to that end, I've tested the game 'as in' and I've only covered two settings: 1080p on Low quality and 4K on Maximum quality.
I'm using four different platforms and a range of graphics cards to see how everything works with the new Shadow of the Erdtree patch. The figures to focus on are the 1% and 0.1% Low values—essentially these numbers are saying that for 99% and 99.9% of the time, the frame rate is greater than those figures. Stuttering can present itself here, resulting in a big gap to the average frame rate.
The other Intel PC, and the two AMD systems, didn't show anything as bad as this, regardless of what GPU was used. There were still spikes in the frame time, so stuttering was still present, but the highest recorded was just under 30 milliseconds . To try and understand what was going on, I used a combination ofIt's worth noting that, while Elden Ring is a DirectX 12 game, with a multi-threaded engine, it's not especially modern in terms of rendering techniques.
As mentioned before, no other game does this on my 14700KF gaming PC and I've tested a lot of games with Pix and Nsight on that system. So it's unlikely there's anything wrong with that setup and it's more likely to be an issue with Elden Ring itself. Frustratingly, I was unable to examine whether this behaviour was present on the other PCs as neither Nsight nor Pix would run or attach correctly to the game.
But what about Shadow of the Erdtree? I'm far off getting there but that's not the case for some of my colleagues.