Valve addresses Elden Ring's Steam Deck performance issues

pcgamer.com:

Elden Ring has just received a giant patch that addresses some of the performance issues affecting PC players. Elden Ring may prove frame rate isn't everything, but it would definitely be nice to play without stutters. Our own hardware team examined the patch's performance and still found examples of the game having trouble, despite the promise of a fix for «hang-ups in certain occasions.»

Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has spoken to Digital Foundry about the game's performance on Steam Deck, giving some insight into what he believes is causing these issues across configurations. It should be noted of course that the Steam Deck is a fixed spec, and it is much easier to identify and fix issues on a single device than on the numerous array of possible PC builds.

One possible explanation given for the issues is loading in shaders: but Griffais reckons this isn't as big an issue as it's being painted as.

«On the Linux/Proton side, we have a pretty extensive shader pre-caching system with multiple levels of source-level and binary cache representations pre-seeded and shared across users,» Griffais told Digital Foundry. «On the Deck, we take this to the next level, since we have a unique GPU/driver combination to target, and the majority of the shaders that you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure. When the game is trying to issue a shader compile through its graphics API of choice, those are usually skipped, as we find the pre-compiled cache entry on disk.»

Griffais explains that the game pre-1.03 had some efficiency issues at certain points, the example given being queuing up command buffers and driving memory resources into «overdrive»: basically, the CPU telling the GPU to render lots of things