The wizards at Digital Foundry have provided a deep-dive into howElden Ring’s newly added Ray Tracing performs on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. The new performance setting came as part ofElden Ring’s 1.09 update, alongside a few balance changes for PvP and PvE gameplay.
FromSoftware has cultivated a habit of arbitrarily announcing quite significant news about its magnum opus over the past year, with the Colosseum updateand theShadow of the Erdtreerevealbeing two of the most notable examples. The most recent patch did so once again, bringing Ray Tracing to the Lands Between over a year after release. Patch notes detailed the minimum and recommended settings that were demanding for a game that has already faced technical difficulties in the past – a rather substantial portion of the patch notes were dedicated to bug fixes.
RELATED:Elden Ring Player Has Helped Thousands Beat the Final Boss
To help determine the functionality ofElden Ring’s Ray Tracing comes Digital Foundry, a group dedicated to the technical analysis of video games. The team did not hold back last year when boldly stating thatElden Ring’s PC performance"simply isn’t good enough," citing severe issues with stuttering and frame drops that rendered the game virtually unplayable at times. Although not quite as damning this time, Digital Foundry questions if Ray Tracing was truly the best feature to develop, especially when there are so many other tools that the community has been requesting for over a year.
In terms of the Ray Tracing itself, the feature comes to PC and all current-gen consoles, excluding the Xbox Series S. Given that the Xbox Series X’s Ray Tracing mode maintains a frame rate just slightly above thirty frames-per-second, it can be assumed that the less powerful Xbox console would have been unable to provide a meaningful experience with the feature. There seem to be no discrepancies between Ray Tracing for PS5 and Xbox Series X, with both providing near-identical quality for RT shadows, ambient occlusion, and draw distance for foliage/geometry. Both aim for the same resolution target and seem to be utilizing dynamic resolution scaling.
Both consoles also compare favorably to the maximum Ray Tracing settings on PC, with the latter only providing less pop-in for foliage, particularly grass.Performance drops considerably for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X when Ray Tracing is turned on, and players can expect to lose approximately fifteen frames per second if activating it without changing other settings. In conclusion, Digital Foundry considers the addition of Ray Tracing to be a welcome surprise, complimenting the shadows and ambient occlusion. However, it is little more than that, and perhaps efforts should have been directed toward providing higher frame caps for PC or maintaining a more consistent frame rate on consoles.
Elden Ringis available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
MORE:Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC Has Its Own Elden Ring to Contend with
