Wednesday, March 9th 2022
Elden Ring PC Stuttering Issues Fixed - But Only on Valve's Steam Deck
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.
Source:
Ars Technica
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.
31 Comments on Elden Ring PC Stuttering Issues Fixed - But Only on Valve's Steam Deck
Blame DirectX12, if the game ran on Vulkan, you could build shaders in parallel using multiple threads.
Look at some Koei Tecmo games, it can always be worse, far worse.
Apparently using DXVK on some DX9 games in Windows can help with stability and performance in some cases.
If you do it in OpenGL, you are mad.
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.
edit: I also have a 5900x at 4ghz all core underclocked at 1.0v and no issues, 100w.
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.
Maybe people are installing it on spinning rust or such?
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