Elden Ring's PC Performance Issues Are Fixed on Steam Deck

Despite numerous great reviews on recently launched Elden Ring and brilliant sales that the title sees, players report not only positive experiences related to the game as a lot of people are having problems trying to play Elden Ring on the PC. Meanwhile, the version on Steam Deck is running much smoother as Valve managed to improve Elden Ring's performance on its new platform.

One of the major issues for Elden Ring players who chose PC, as Eurogamer suggests, was related to frame rate and stuttering. "We were looking at yet another PC game suffering from shader compilation issues: split-second pauses whenever a new visual effect came into play", shared Eurogamer's Richard Leadbetter.

This issue becomes harder to solve when it comes to PC as the range of hardware specifications there is much wider than it is on consoles. Meanwhile, consoles with their fixed hardware nature have an advantage as they have pre-compiled shaders that are included in the package which makes the process less complicated. Being a PC, Steam Deck is still a piece of fixed hardware, so it has the same benefits, providing Valve the ability to implement them.

"On the Linux/Proton side, we have a pretty extensive shader pre-caching system with multiple levels of source-level and binary cache representations pre-seeded and shared across users," shared Valve's coder Pierre-Loup Griffais. "On the Deck, we take this to the next level, since we have a unique GPU/driver combination to target, and the majority of the shaders that you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure. When the game is trying to issue a shader compile through its graphics API of choice, those are usually skipped, as we find the pre-compiled cache entry on disk."

At the same time, Griffais suggests that most of the issues in Elden Ring were also driven by several other factors. "The recent example we've highlighted has more to do with the game creating many thousand resources such as command buffers at certain spots, which was making our memory manager go into overdrive trying to handle it," said the coder. "We cache such allocations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a ton."

Griffais also admitted that he "can't comment" whether the issue is experienced on other platforms, but he noted that while playing on Steam Deck  "the experience has been very smooth".

You can find the original interview with Pierre-Loup Griffais here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.