Elden Ring’s Ray Tracing is a Bummer

Fans of a stable frame rate should run away!

Alex Rowe
6 min readMar 23, 2023

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The player learns the lore of Elden Ring while resting near the opening of the game.
The shading under the leaves of the bush to the left side of my character is new/different. Yay? PC screenshot taken by the author.

Patch 1.09 for last year’s iconic RPG Elden Ring came out this morning, with a whole host of balance tweaks and added ray tracing support for PC, Xbox Series X, and PS5.

If you scroll to the bottom of the patch notes (published here on Steam, which I chose to link since the game’s official site hilariously hasn’t yet listed them yet at the time of this writing), you’ll notice that the ray tracing PC hardware requirements are somewhat intense. It recommends a 3060ti for 1080p at low settings and a 3070ti or freaking AMD 6900XT (a recent flagship) for 1080p at high settings.

It must have a ton of cool new graphical awesomeness then, right? It must have beautiful global illumination, high quality reflections, and brand-new lighting effects without any major loss in performance. How else are they justifying this hardware ask?

Well, if you couldn’t tell from this build up, it doesn’t have any of that stuff. Instead, it has a new ray traced ambient occlusion method, which offers smoother and more accurate shading around objects, foliage, and crevices. Characters have better self-shadows on their own armor and interiors look slightly more realistic with better shade in the corners. Trees and grass get a small upgrade to their shading as…

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Alex Rowe
Alex Rowe

Written by Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. Audio producer, video editor, and former magazine game critic. Look mom, I’m using my English degree!