Elden Ring finally offers something new for lovers of the hardcore action RPG genre. If you're an expert at Dark Souls, don't mind dying over and over, and are willing to adapt and learn, then Elden Ring is for you. It's one of the best Souls-like games so far, but it's also difficult and unforgiving. This makes it a terrible choice for players who just like to enjoy themselves and jump in for a quick play session for some casual distraction from their daily life. On the other hand, if you're willing to embrace the genre's concept, you'll be rewarded with an amazing experience after triumph—eventually. I still feel not including difficulty options is a missed opportunity to make the game interesting for a larger audience. If you liked previous Souls games, you should definitely check out Elden Ring in a week, or month. While the gameplay is excellent, the game is currently plagued by technical difficulties that make it difficult to like.

I'm not sure what's happening, but From Software failed big with their DirectX 12 implementation. The game is full of stutter, which reminds me a bit of shader compiling in other games. As you progress through the world, new objects and enemies are encountered, which use various shader effects for rendering. If such a new shader is loaded, the game will pause for a brief moment to prepare that new shader, upload it to the GPU and get things working. What I find extremely hard to believe is that nobody noticed this during playtesting. DirectX 12 is the only rendering engine available in Elden Ring, so it couldn't have been missed. If it was an easy fix, wouldn't they have fixed it by now? Adding a shader cache is trivial, precompiling shaders at game start is another option. Conspiracy theorists suspect that the stuttering is due to Easy Anticheat, which was apparently added last minute, but that is not the case as you can copy eldenring.exe to start_protected_game.exe and bypass EAC that way. I'm sure we'll learn more in the coming days. As it is right now, the game is pretty much unplayable on a lot of hardware setups, even high-end ones. Don't get me wrong, you can play it perfectly fine, but in Elden Ring, timing matters a lot, and making a mistake usually means you're dead, so having FPS drop from 60 to 15 in the split second when the boss swings his huge weapon that will one-shot you kind of sucks.

After playing Elden Ring much more, I have to revise my previous statement. The stutters are relatively mild after the first zone, and are usually gone once you've made some progress in a new area. Since your first attempt at a boss fight will end with you dying anyway, subsequent runs are pretty much completely stutter-free, making the game overall very playable—I'm enjoying it.

Overall graphics are a big improvement over previous Souls titles, but definitely not "next-gen"—actually, I'd call them "dated" for 2022. A lot of lighting in the maps is prebaked, which means it's static, so players and NPCs will not cast shadows for those light sources. In other parts of the world, mostly indoors, the designers took care of that by carefully placing dynamic light sources for effect, which works reasonably well in creating a feeling of immersion as long as you're not focusing on understanding how the engine works. While VRAM requirements are very low, I feel like the quality of textures is quite good; they all look crisp. What's really good-looking is the geometry on the ruins and other buildings—the map authors did a great job here, creating beautiful vistas. While playing, I encountered several small rendering errors and artifacts, nothing serious, but it still reinforces that "rushed" feeling.

In terms of performance, we're left with a little bit of uncertainty because the game is limited to 60 FPS. This is not V-Sync, which adds input lag, but a classic framerate limiter. Even on a 120 or 144 Hz monitor, you'll be running at 60 FPS—this is unacceptable. Claiming that the physics is linked to the framerate is a lame argument in 2022 and actually confirms bad engine design. I'm also not sure if animations and I-Frames really require a 60 FPS limit—other engines can handle this just fine. Mouse and keyboard controls are also a bit clunky. To me, it just feels like the developer simply isn't focusing on giving PC players the best-possible experience. The advanced graphics settings are nice, though. There are plenty of options to fine-tune the graphics to your hardware.

For a 60 FPS experience at 1080p with maximum settings, you don't need a lot of hardware. A GeForce RTX 3050, RX 6600 XT or RTX 2060 will do—stuttering is present on all cards. Let's hope they can fix that soon. For a fluid 1440p experience, you'll need an RTX 3060, RX 6600 XT or RTX 2070—pretty reasonable. 4K60 is in reach for the RTX 3070 Ti, Radeon RX 6800 XT and better; the RTX 3070 is very close with 55.4 FPS. Modders are already working on removing the 60 FPS limit; once From Software releases a patch that addresses the lag spikes, I'll take another look at Elden Ring.

I did take another look, even thought From didn't release any fix for the stuttering for one month now, and have to say I'm glad I did. While the game lacks a lot of quality of life improvements, it's still very enjoyable.