While I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, with my performance having been pretty good so far, there are a lot of people out there having problems trying to play Elden Ring on the PC. Those playing on Valve’s Steam Deck are not among them.
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Stuttering has been a huge issue for PC players since the game’s launch, even after an update, and many suspected this was down to the way the game compiled shaders, or in this case, how it doesn’t do it very well. (Not that Elden Ring is alone here. Google “compile shaders PC” and you’ll find a ton of games suffering performance hits and a case of the stutters.)
This doesn’t happen on consoles because, with fixed hardware (as in, everyone’s console is exactly the same, and doesn’t have the infinite component variations present on PC), it can be done ahead of time instead of every time you fire a game up, as so often happens with a PC game. The Steam Deck, while being a PC, is also a piece of fixed hardware, so can enjoy the same benefits, provided Valve is able to implement them.
Which in this case they have. Here’s Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais showing off the Steam Deck version’s improvements last month in a preview build of an optimisation fix that is now live for all users:
As Griffais tells Eurogamer,
That said, it turns out shader compiling wasn’t the main issue here, as was originally thought. Instead, Graffais says it was actually down to:
