Fans are celebrating Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree’s vast new open world and intricate DLC gameplay, but technical issues, including persistent sub-60 FPS drops and traversal hitches, continue to hinder the experience.
On consoles, Elden Ring‘s core performance issues are still evident across various technical aspects after Shadow of the Erdtree dropped—especially when compared closely by Digital Foundry on YouTube. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions suffer from persistent sub-60 FPS drops, particularly noticeable during intense gameplay segments. These inconsistencies are further exacerbated by traversal hitches, which disrupt the seamless experience Elden Ring players expected.
Elden Ring has suffered from significant performance issues across all platforms since it originally launched, and continues to today. On PlayStation 5, the game frequently drops below the targeted 60 FPS, with VRR only barely mitigating the problem. Quality and ray tracing modes fare worse, often struggling to maintain 30 to 40 FPS. The Xbox Series X mirrors these issues, lagging slightly behind the PS5 despite its VRR implementation. The Xbox Series S delivers the weakest performance, with frame rates fluctuating heavily.
Elden Ring on PC may even have the biggest struggles with inconsistent frame times, causing noticeable stuttering, particularly during traversal. The game’s lack of support for ultrawide aspect ratios and higher frame rate caps, as well as its being locked at 60 FPS without mods, exacerbates these issues. Even on high-end hardware, achieving smooth performance is challenging. Enabling ray tracing degrades performance, imposing significant loads on both the CPU and GPU and leading to severe stuttering.
Given these ongoing problems, the visual benefits of ray tracing do not justify the huge performance hit, making it impractical for mid-range systems.
Players are certainly not happy with Elden Ring‘s performance issues. Some pointed out the paradox of the game’s success and its poor optimization, with one stating, “A game that sold 25 million plus DLC sales and From Software still don’t know how to make games run properly.” Others expressed disbelief over the title’s lack of basic features and many expressed frustration with FromSoftware specifically not using its huge financial success to fix things.
Overall, there’s a level of shock among the Elden Ring fandom that such a well-selling title and expansion failed to meet tech demands—and some pointed to the irony that the PS4 actually runs better than next-gen options.
Surprisingly, the PS4 version running on PS5 hardware actually provides a far more stable experience, though at a slight cost to visual quality.
FromSoftware has not yet replied to any Elden Ring DLC tech complaints.
