Elden Ring’s ray tracing update is out – here’s how it looks and runs on PC

rockpapershotgun.com:

Surprise! The long-promised patch that brings ray tracing to Elden Ring is here, over a year after release. There’s much more in the version 1.09 update besides – the patch notes list plenty of balance changes and bug fixes – but given the sheer amount of time the new ray tracing features have been in the works, not to mention the fact that Elden Ring has never exactly been an exemplar of technical reliability, I wanted to focus in on 'em and see what performance is like on PC.

There are four RT quality levels to choose from, though in typical Elden Ring UI fashion, the new setting doesn’t explain what kinds of effects it enables. Dataminer Lance McDonald reckons it’s just shadows and ambient occlusion (the darkening effect applied to objects that are close together), and after playing for a while, I agree with him. Shadows are softer and more naturalistic than they are on the standard Maximum quality preset, and there’s no sign of improved reflections of global illumination.

Ultimately, the difference ray tracing makes is far more subtle than eye-exploding. Foliage shadows look better and there’s a tiny bit more depth on bricky textures, the latter thanks to the AO upgrade. In the comparison shots below you can also see a touch of added darkening in the corner of the Caelid bonfire room, as well as more noticeable shadows cast by the fallen corpses and our Tarnished lad himself. (Actually Hayden’s, since I used his save for this. Without asking. Cheers Hayden.)

Really, though, after a year I was kind of hoping for a more dramatic visual overhaul from this ray tracing update. It’s also unfortunate that it didn’t come with DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling support, to help numb the pain of the performance cost.

Flicki