Proton update soothes Elden Ring stuttering on the Steam Deck

rockpapershotgun.com:

Elden Ring is clearly going down well, but it also has bigger problems than unexplained rolling goats. Even with a day-one patch, problems with frame rate drops, crashes, and visual glitches have been widely reported by players; I myself encountered some suttering while putting together our performance and settings guide. However, if you’re lucky enough to get a Steam Deck in the first round of order fulfilments, you could see improvements that have yet to materialise on Windows.

Valve engineer Pierre Loup-Griffais, who also recently spoke to us about the Steam Deck, revealed on Twitter the work being done to smooth out Elden Ring’s stuttering problem. It comes via an update to Proton, the compatibility software that Valve co-develops to make Windows games run on Linux-based operating systems – including the Deck’s SteamOS. The update is due out sometime this week, but is already available on the ‘Bleeding Edge’ beta branch of Proton Experimental, which is available to anyone. As such, I set everything up on the Steam Deck to try it out, and for the most part it works quite nicely.

As you can see in the video above (credit to Liam), especially around the five minute mark, there’s a significant reduction in slowdown after the update. These moments of sluggishness aren’t eradicated completely, but they’re less frequent and over much faster. Is it smoother overall than playing on the best graphics cards? Not exactly, as the Low quality preset will rarely get you much higher than 40fps outside of cutscenes, but at least it’s more consistent now.

Again, this update will soon be part of Proton as standard, but if you do have an early Deck and want to try it out, install Proton Experimental by searching for it in your