Steam Deck plays Elden Ring better than a $5,000 PC thanks to Valve

techradar.com:

Sick of Elden Ring and its less-than-stellar performance on PC? If you're able, you may want to give the game a try on Valve's portable Steam Deck console, where the developer has reportedly fixed most of the game's issues itself.

As reported by Kotaku, Valve has managed to fix some of Elden Ring's most glaring PC performance issues, such as heavy stuttering as a result of how the game streams background assets. Thanks to the fixed hardware of the Steam Deck, as is also the case on the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 versions of the game, issues such as stuttering are more easily remedied than they would be on the more malleable PC platform.

Last month, Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais posted to Twitter that a fix for Elden Ring on Steam Deck was on the way, and it looks like the patch is finally here. Owners of Valve's portable machine should now have a more consistent performance than what's available on a more expensive gaming PC.

The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck. Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental. pic.twitter.com/5oSnXtF2OGFebruary 26, 2022

Griffais gave a more technical explanation when speaking to Eurogamer, saying:

«Shader pipeline-driven stutter isn’t the majority of the big hitches we’ve seen in [Elden Ring]. The recent example we’ve highlighted has more to do with the game creating many thousand resources such as command buffers at certain spots, which was making our memory manager go into overdrive trying to handle it. We cache such allocations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a ton.»

By pre-caching Elden