Elden Ring just got ray tracing, but you might not want to use it

People stubbornly sticking to 1080p monitors have been vindicated once again.

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Elden Ring got an update today, and things are getting downright illuminated in The Lands Between. The 1.09 patch brings a slate of bug fixes and makes all sorts of tweaks to Elden Ring’s weapons and combat, but the headline item here is that the game is finally getting ray tracing support. There’s just one problem: You probably won’t want to actually use it.

You can go switch ray tracing on in Elden Ring’s graphics menu, but what youwon’tfind there is a toggle for Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR support, the miraculous frame generation tech that lets you maintain a playable framerate even with taxing graphical gewgaws turned on. That means actually activating ray tracing has the potential to slow your game to a slideshow, especially at high resolutions.

That’s probably why FromSoft’s minimum and recommended specs for Elden Ring’s new ray tracing mode both suggest you play the game at 1080p: Any higher and you’d begin to sacrifice too many frames.

To be fair, that’s FromSoft’s recommendation for builds based around Nvidia 30-series and AMD 6000-series GPUs. I suspect players using bleeding edge 40- and 7000-series graphics cards could probably get away with dialling their resolution up a bit. But considering thatbarely anyone is using those cards yet, most of us are gonna have to settle one way or another. Here are those minimum and recommended specs in full:

Minimum specs

Recommended specs

So, I guess be prepared to sacrifice either your resolution or your delicious traced rays, at least for now. With any luck, a future update will chuck in DLSS and FSR support and we can really head off to the races.

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Apart from the ray tracing stuff, the patch also brings a bunch of balance changes and fixes, which I’ll list below in full. To give you a quick taste, though, I’ll tell you that—joy of joys—FromSoft has made great axes even more powerful than they were before, andthe community is pretty stoked.

Elden Ring 1.09 patch notes

PvP-exclusive balance adjustmentsThe adjustments in this section do not affect single-player or cooperative play.

General balance adjustments

Ashes of War adjustments

Bug fixes

One of Josh’s first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he’s been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He’ll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin’s Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you’re all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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