Actual-time ray-traced graphics have been massive buzz across the time that Elden Ring was first introduced. Near the discharge, Bandai-Namco, the sport’s writer, additionally introduced that the developer FromSoftware can be releasing a patch for its magnum opus that provides ray-traced results. Properly, that patch is right here now.
The discharge of the replace was a little bit of a shock; many Elden Ring gamers thought that if the promised patch ever got here, it might be with the sport’s upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. It is doable that the DLC was crafted with these visible results in thoughts, and that FromSoftware needed to get it out now to resolve any issues earlier than punting with the growth.
RT on the precise. See the delicate shadows underneath the desk and foliage?
Official details about the replace is fairly meager, however from our investigation, the ray-traced results on provide appear to be restricted to ray-traced ambient occlusion and some ray-traced shadows, significantly these originating from daylight. Whereas that is slightly disappointing—we’d have favored to have seen full ray-traced world illumination, like in Cyberpunk 2077‘s “Psycho” mode, or in Dying Gentle 2—the results on provide are nonetheless a noticeable improve over the unique sport’s look.
The images on this publish are cropped out of full-size screenshots; you’ll be able to click on them to see the total photos, however they will nonetheless be resized. If you wish to see the unique 4K screenshots, you’ll be able to hit this hyperlink to the writer’s Google Drive. Wanting on the photographs by doing an A-B comparability, toggling between -on and -off photographs, it turns into extraordinarily evident the place the ray-traced enhancements are.
That is tougher to see, however examine the sunshine on the touchdown and the shadows on the books.
Clearly, essentially the most noticeable impact in most locations is the ray-traced ambient occlusion. Changing the easy (and decidedly last-gen) display screen house impact that the sport had earlier than, the ray-traced ambient occlusion is each extra correct and extra intense, with darkish shadows showing in corners and close to ledges the place there have been none earlier than. Shadows seem underneath small objects like books and fungal caps, and it actually enriches the element and realism of most scenes fairly considerably.
In the meantime, the ray-traced shadows are primarily (if not solely) solid by daylight. They’re softer and extra correct than the sport’s unique shadow maps, which might look slightly bit unrealistically-precise at occasions the place the brand new shadows have extra of a fuzzy look. They’re additionally much more widespread than the sport’s unique shadows, being utilized to extra objects within the scene. Like with the RTAO, it is a delicate however important enchancment.
Word lack of the halo across the character brought on by screen-space AO.
What’s the associated fee? Properly, an entire lot extra RAM and VRAM utilization, we will inform you that. Additionally a major chunk of efficiency, in the event you’re utilizing a lower-end card, or a previous-generation AMD GPU. We have not carried out detailed efficiency testing, and in your writer’s private machine—with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a GeForce RTX 4080—there was no notable impact to efficiency in any respect, even enjoying in 4K, however most people aren’t rocking an RTX 4080 card.
Truly, even some customers with high-end programs have complained of poor efficiency, and apparently it could actually actually crush framerates on the consoles. Over on the Elden Ring subreddit, /u/F13menace says his sport is working at “a rock stable 5fps” on Xbox Sequence X. A reply says “the framerate is janky as hell on the ps5,” so apparently, it is no higher on Sony’s platform.
The sport’s unique lighting might trigger bizarre highlights on the perimeters of objects.
Usually in a ray-traced sport, you could possibly search to offset the price of the lifelike visuals by utilizing an clever upscaler, like DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. None of these are current on this sport, and mixed with the precise selection of results that FromSoftware applied, we suspect that this patch was primarily created with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X in thoughts. You possibly can (and possibly ought to) run FSR 2 on these consoles, however it’s not out there right here—no less than, not but, anyway.
The patch additionally got here together with the standard slew of steadiness modifications and bug fixes, which you’ll examine at Bandai Namco’s website.
