Valve Explains How It Fixed Elden Ring on Steam Deck

ign.com:

While Elden Ring has been having numerous issues on PC, the version on Steam Deck is now running a lot smoother and Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has shared how they fixed the handheld gaming PC's problems with the game.

At launch, one of the biggest issues those who chose to play Elden Ring on PC ran into was related to frame rate and stuttering. As reported by Eurogamer, its "working theory" was that "we were looking at yet another PC game suffering from shader compilation issues: split-second pauses whenever a new visual effect came into play."

This is a much bigger issue to solve on PC as the range of hardware specs on systems are obviously a lot greater than seen on console. Using this same thought process, the Steam Deck also "has an advantage, because it is a fixed piece of hardware, just like a console."

"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 said. "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.

"Shader pipeline-driven stutter isn't the majority of the big hitches we've seen in that game. 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