In fairness, the quality of From Software’s PC ports had been improving over time. The original Dark Souls was a disaster, but from its sequel up to Sekiro, PC users received the best versions of those games. Unfortunately, this welcome upward trajectory nose-dives with the release of Elden Ring. Its issues are numerous, but most egregious of all is a persistent stuttering that ruins the flow of the game – it’s a genuinely poor presentation that needs to be addressed urgently.
Quite how the game reached consumers in this state isn’t clear, but the ‘why’ does have some level of explanation. Elden Ring is the first title that sees the From Software engine transition to DirectX 12. As we’ve discussed previously (most recently with the disappointing PC port of Final Fantasy 7 Remake), DX12 gives developers much more control of the GPU: elements such as memory management and threading are no longer handled by the driver, meaning that many responsibilities move across directly to the developer. The stuttering issues suggest that shader compilation management is poorly handled, with shader code compiled the first time it’s needed in-game, generating split-second delays throughout the experience.
It’s pervasive. There’s a noticeable stutter when you first move your character. There’s another when you first thrust your sword. Every time a new particle effect is generated, the game stutters again. For every new enemy type you encounter, there’s another large stutter. It looks to me like every single time a new shader effect is invoked that you may not have seen before, the game tries to compile it ‘just in time’ as the game is rendering. Therein lies the issue: in my testing, every ‘first’ within Elden Ring produces pauses of up to a quarter of a second.
The more you play, the fewer ‘firsts’ you encounter, so game fluidity inevitably improves. Replaying content you’ve already experienced will also have present less stutter as the shader compilation was cached the first time you played. However, this all resets to default every time the game is updated, reinstalled or if the user updates their graphics driver – in which case, the stuttering issues return with the same severity as before. We’ve seen a couple of reports of tuned PCs using Intel Alder Lake CPUs being able to run the compilation so fast that the game still runs at 60fps, but even if confirmed, this means that only the tiniest proportion of PCs in the world are capable of running the title at a consistent 60fps. At this point it’s worth stressing that consoles do not have the shader compilation issue: they are fixed platforms, so games ship with the shaders pre-compiled.