Elden Ring has suffered some pretty significant stuttering ever since its launch, and while developer FromSoftware and publisher Bandai Namco have acknowledged the issue and are working on fixes, we haven't seen on yet. As our EiC Evan says, Elden Ring proves frame rate isn't everything, but it would definitely be nice to play without a stutter ending your quest prematurely.
A recent patch for Elden Ring, 1.03, just dropped, and with it some new questline fixes and phases, NPCs, and even handy map markers. Though among the extensive Elden Ring patch notes, there was also the vague promise of «other performance fixes and bug fixes».
You can see above an example of some of the stuttering in version 1.03 of the game. So, sadly those «performance fixes» aren't the sort to nix the stuttering in the game entirely in our experience. Though there is a bug fix for «hang-ups in certain occasions» that may prove helpful to some, but it certainly isn't the catchall fix from what we've seen.
I just ran through Stormveil Castle and tried not to die long enough to see if the stuttering persists on version 1.03, and it very much does. I've not really noticed any improvement in performance, either, but it sounds like the bug fixes with this version are more specifically tailored to certain instances than any overarching fix for performance issues.
So we'll just have to wait a little longer, but at least we know FromSoftware is working on a fix for Elden Ring. Further down the line it hopes to add ray tracing support, too, so you'd really hope the performance issues were fixed by the time that update reaches us.
Elden Ring guide: Conquer the Lands BetweenElden Ring bosses: How to beat themElden Ring map fragments: Reveal the worldElden
Read more on pcgamer.com