A few days ago, the long-awaited expansion Shadow of the Erdtree for the role-playing game Elden Ring was released. It brings an absolutely huge amount of new content, but what about the technical side? At the time of its release, Elden Ring was not particularly well known on either consoles or PC. So, after more than two years, Digital Foundry took another look at the game and found out what the situation is.
Tom Morgan has made sure to cover all current-gen consoles, and the results are disappointing, the game is technically almost the same as it was when it launched. That is, if you ignore the fact that last year the developers added a ray tracing mode, which, however, further reduces the already unstable frame rate, and in the worst situations even drops below 30 FPS. The obvious choice is the performance mode, but it is still quite unstable.
The game runs slightly better on PS5 than XSX (even worse on XSS), but has the downside of a smaller VRR window. As long as the game maintains a frame rate above 48 FPS, the PS5 has the advantage, but in demanding scenes the frame rate can drop even lower, which is where the advantage of Xbox consoles, which have a VRR window of up to 24 Hz, comes into play. If you don’t have VRR support at all, the game won’t run smoothly.
Ironically, the best way to play Elden Ring on consoles as smoothly as possible is to play the PS4 version on PS5 thanks to backwards compatibility. Although image quality will have to be sacrificed in the form of lower resolution and other concessions, you can count on an almost completely stable 60 FPS with minimal drops.
And what does it look like on PC? Unfortunately, to make matters worse, nothing has changed at all, and in one respect the game is even worse than before. The game is still capped at 60 frames per second and you can’t raise it without modifications, support for ultra-wide monitors doesn’t work, and Elden Ring doesn’t even support any upscaling or image generation technologies.
An even bigger problem is the very frequent stuttering during the gameplay and unstable frame times that cannot be avoided. This happens even on the best processors, Alex Battaglia tested the game on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. On slightly weaker processors, it can happen that the frame rate drops to 0 FPS from time to time. In addition, there is also an issue with V-Sync, causing unexplained frame drops.
Battaglia sharply criticizes the developer for the technical side: “Other games don’t have this problem, so it’s not your computer’s fault.” Battaglia tells the audience. “The only problem here is FromSoftware and their inability to make technically sound games. I’m being intentionally harsh, FromSoftware needs to stop releasing things with such poor technical quality considering how much money they make and how much money it costs to develop. Shadow of the Erdtree does nothing to actually fix the problems the game has had for years. And in fact, in some ways, it’s worse. In my opinion, that’s unacceptable.” closes the video.
Shadow of the Erdtree has the same major technical issues as the base game from about two years ago, perhaps even more. Considering the amount of money From Software makes, they should take technical user feedback into account, which they obviously don’t do. Otherwise there is no excuse. https://t.co/hdeHD3gvsV
— Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) June 26, 2024
Source : Zing
