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Elden Ring Nightreignhas been a pleasant surprise for Souls fans. This game takes the brutal difficulty curve of FromSoftware titles and mixes it with the replayability of a rogue-like, doing so without abandoning the core combat and boss design of the previous title.
Unfortunately, that also means the performance woes of Elden Ring’s PC port return in Nightreign. Getting this game to perform well on a modern system should prove easy if you have good hardware, but those on older systems will need to fiddle with the settings to get a solid frame rate. Fortunately, we’ve done the hard work for you. Here are our recommended graphical settings for Elden Ring on PC.
Nightreign PC Port Performance
Elden Ring Nightreign’s PC performance fares better than Elden Ring proper, although this title still suffers from many ofthe technical issues present in FromSoftware’s previous title. On an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X, frame rates were at a constant 60 FPS but would frequently be interrupted by 20-50 millisecond microstutters while exploring the Lands Between.Microstutters are still an issue in the open world, regardless of system specs.Machines with weaker components might experience longer or more frequent stutters.
Frame Rate Drops On Modern GPUs
FromSoftware has acknowledged the frame drop issue in thepatch notes for Patch 1.0.1. They suggest lowering visual settings to “Medium” or “High” until a patch is deployed.
In our testing, lowering your settings does not impact microstutters but does benefit 1% FPS lows. If you’re experiencing frequent frame drops in fights, lowering your settings is always a good idea.
As with all FromSoftware titles,Elden Ring Nightreign’s frame rate cannot exceed 60 FPS.There is no way of circumventing this frame rate limit without installing user-created mods—and as of writing, no such mods are available.Vsync is also enabled at all times, although you can force Vsync off through your GPU manufacturer’s control panel. Doing so willnotremove the 60 FPS cap and introduce noticeable screen tearing.
Nightreign lacks any form of upscaling or frame generation, so anyone struggling to achieve 60 FPS will need to lower their graphical settings or display resolution to achieve better performance. Before we cover optimal settings, it’s worth noting thatNightreign is a CPU-bound title.FromSoftware games don’t make great use of a system’s GPU, even at 4K native resolution; Nightreign is no exception. If you’re playing this game on an older system or handheld device, such as a Steam Deck, lowering the internal resolution is your best bet for smoother performance.
Graphical Presets Comparison
The image gallery above showcases Nightreign’s four graphical presets in order: low, medium, high, and maximum.
Lowis the worst preset here and should be avoided for most PC configurations. It disables most shadows, sets lighting quality to such a low resolution that you can count the pixels, and has atrocious pop-in issues when swapping LODs for detailed assets. This setting should only be considered for handheld devices.
Mediumoffers a much better graphical experience from low, albeit with a small performance hit. Ambient occlusion and contact shadows are present, and most textures have a noticeable quality improvement. Volumetric lighting still looks blurry at this preset, so consider bumping these settings to high if your system has enough headroom. An RTX 2060 or RX 5700 XT should be able to achieve 50-60 FPS at 1080p. Any stronger PC should have no issues playing on medium.
LOD Pop-In
Distant terrain and shadows have noticeable pop-in on the low and medium presets.
We recommendhighfor overall visual quality. Medium to high performance takes a notable hit,although the improvements to shadow resolution and ambient occlusion are worth the tradeoff for most systems. Any RTX 30-series card or AMD equivalent should be able to handle this preset at 60 FPS at the card’s intended resolution, albeit with the occasional FPS dip during ahectic boss fight.
Maximumonly noticeably differs in contact shadow resolution. Every other setting looks virtually identical to the naked eye, even at 4K resolution. The performance hit from high to maximum simply isn’t worth it for most machines. If you aren’t hitting a constant frame rate and have any settings on maximum, drop them to high before adjusting anything else.
Medium or High
Antialiasing (AA)
High or Maximum
Grass
If your system still struggles with these settings, set all graphical options to medium.
We’ll be using thehigh preset as a baselinefor this graphics configuration, as it offers the best mix of graphical fidelity and performance. Maximum is only worth using for theLightingandGrasssettings, as these seem to determine how far objects will render from your character’s location. Higher means you’ll experience less pop-in.
Excluding resolution, the two largest FPS hits are going to betexturesandshadows.We suggest you run bothat leaston medium, ideally high if your system can handle it. The visual downgrade from medium to low is not worth the small performance gains you receive. We also recommend droppingeffectsquality to medium. It grants a small boost to performance with no hit to visual quality. Finally, you’re able to dropwater surfaceto low since it doesn’t seem to have any noticeable effect on graphical quality.
If you experience motion sickness or dislike blurring effects in general, we recommend disablingdepth of field and motion blurfor a cleaner image. Both settings do have a performance impact on high quality and make combat harder to parse in general.
