Make the most of your Elden Ring experience by choosing the best settings for your computer. All options are listed here.
FromSoftware's latest open-world action RPG, Elden Ring, puts players in the Land Betweens. Gaming critics have praised it as one of the best video games of all time on Open Critic.
Before PC gamers can look at the various starting classes offered by Elden Ring, they will need to ensure that their PC can run them. Many players were concerned about the requirements for their PCs when they were first released. Elden Ring provides various customization options to allow PC gamers to optimize the game for their specific system. These are the top settings to maximize the Lands Between's vast landscapes.
Best Elden Ring PC Settings [minimum System requirements]
Elden Ring players will be able to go through and customize 14 different graphic settings on their computer to maximize its performance and efficiency potential.
Before we get into the details, it is worth noting that Elden Ring will support ray-tracing. The frame rate on PC is limited to 60 frames per second.
Players can either adjust each option individually or select one of four presets when they go into the graphic settings menu. These are Maximum, High, Medium, and Low.
We recommend that you play around with the presets to see how they affect your performance, depending on what graphics card you have. Take a look at your FPS to determine which settings will get you close to the 60 FPS limit.
Players using a GTX1060 reported a 35-40 FPS average one the Maximum preset.
Optimal Graphics Settings Recommendations
These are the settings players who can meet the minimum system requirements can use to get the best graphics and performance tradeoff in Elden Ring:
- Texture Quality:Medium
- Antialiasing Quality:Maximum
- SSAO:Medium
- Depth of Field:Maximum
- Motion Blur:Off
- Shadow Quality:Maximum
- Lightning Quality:Maximum
- Effects Quality:Maximum
- Volumetric Quality:Maximum
- Reflection Quality:Maximum
- Water Surface Quality:Maximum
- Shader Quality:Medium
- Global Illumination Quality:High
- Grass Quality:Medium
These settings will work on any PC that meets the minimum requirements. While these are the recommended graphic settings, every PC gaming system is unique so you will probably need to further tweak them to squeeze every last ounce of performance from your system.
Additionally, below we share some great insights on Graphics settings tweaking and their effect on performance by James Archer, Hardware Editor on gaming publication Rock Paper Shotgun.
Here are James' graphics settings recommendations:
- Texture Quality Medium
- SSAO Medium
- Shadow Quality – Maximum
- Shader Quality Medium
- Grass Quality Medium
- Everything else on High or Maximum
Texture Quality: Lowering the texture quality from Maximum to Medium only resulted in a speed increase of 1fps, or just under 3%. Despite that, it's one of the more impactful settings to lower piecemeal.
Antialiasing Quality: I was only able to achieve an extra 1fps by reducing it from High to Low. On higher resolutions, it's worth doing regardless, but at 1080p, I'd recommend using AA with higher quality.
SSAO:Dropping ambient occlusion from Maximum to Medium doesn't significantly impact visual quality, and the 3% performance improvement could be worthwhile.
Depth of Field:This effect can be reduced based on personal preferences, as it won't affect performance in any way.
Motion Blur:Just like Depth of Field, changing this will not impact performance, though I felt disabling it entirely gave Elden Ring a more crisp, PC-like appearance.
Shadow Quality: Do not lower it under any circumstances. Go into the advanced settings and change it to Maximum, even if you're using the High preset. This is due to a ghastly flashing effect on trees caused by lower-quality shadows that flicker in and out of existence. Although it's not as bad on High as it is on Medium or Low, and Medium does gain 3% in performance, I don't think it's a worthwhile exchange. I recommend sticking with Maximum to keep disco trees in check.
Lighting Quality:Lowering this will not improve performance, so leave it as is.
Again, I didn't gain any extra frames by toning this down. On the other hand, there are very few visible differences between Maximum and Medium quality effects.
Volumetric Quality: Another one to leave on. Volumetric effects nicely complement Elden Ring's fantasy aesthetic and dropping them from Maximum to Medium still resulted in a 37fps average frame rate.
Reflection Quality:As with Reflection Quality, this setting appears to have little effect on performance; both at Maximum and Medium, I got 37fps.
Water Surface Quality: Even though I trod through a haunted pond for my benchmark run, lowering this setting didn't improve performance much. I recommend keeping it on High.
Shader Quality: This was one of the better settings to drop, as Medium shaders performed 3% better than Maximum shaders. That was without harming fidelity too severely.
Global Illumination Quality: Another whole lotta nothing, at least in terms of performance gains. Even dropping it from Maximum to Medium didn't increase FPS.
Grass Quality: It was the grass all along.A switch from Maximum to Medium quality greenery will be noticeable in more verdant regions but also produced a relatively strong 5% performance boost in my tests.