Elden Ring Ray Tracing Bug Makes Astel Fight Feel Even More Epic

thegamer.com:

Elden Ring got its ray tracing update last week, and 5 GB later, it turned out to be a bit of a bust. Most players couldn't really tell the difference between Elden Ring with RTX on versus off in terms of visual fidelity, but they definitely noticed the drop in performance ray tracing would cause. That's a problem for a game where life and death rests on the knife edge of a reliable frame rate, so most Tarnished without an RTX 4080 have wisely chosen to leave RTX off until some significant optimization happens.

But not everyone. Mysterious_Cause5298 over on the Elden Ring subreddit kept ray tracing on for their fight against Astel, and as you can see in the video below, there's a definite difference with RTX on. It might not be the difference FromSoftware and Nvidia wanted, but maybe it'll stick around past the next patch.

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As you can see, the fight against Astel starts out as you'd expect, but things become wildly different as soon as Astel teleports away. The star-born monstrosity leaves a creeping darkness that seems to permeate the entire boss room. Astel itself has a black outline, and the giant laser it shoots creates a vivid purple outline that looks straight out of Tron.

The top comment notes the Tron reference, but also the fact that this graphical glitch has perhaps caused the most noticeable difference between Elden Ring's different ray tracing options. It also looks pretty epic, a sentiment that Mysterious_Cause5298 agrees with.

"Agreed," they wrote. "It feels a lot more like void magic fuckery when the world actually breaks. Hard to tell what is happening in the fight though."

In other Elden Ring news, there's a new hero in town. Following in the