Now that Valve has finally fixed some of the major issues that were plaguing Elden Ring players on Steam Deck, the company has explained how it went about improving stability.
In a new discussion with Digital Foundry, Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais has explained how the company worked around the problems that were previously reported by players, including the stuttering frame rate issue that was brought up last month as a top priority.
“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.”
Although the stuttering issues seem to be resolved on the Steam Deck, the issue is still present on standard PC versions of the game. Griffais explained that most of the Elden Ring issues were caused by other factors, saying that the shader pipeline-driven stutter wasn’t the majority of the problems the team has seen in the 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,” the developer explained.
“We cache such allocations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a ton. I can’t comment as to whether this is the problem the game experiences on other platforms, as well, but we’ve been playing on Deck with all these elements in place and the experience has been very smooth.”
Yesterday, From Software released a rather big Elden Ring patch that nerfed the Hoarfrost Stomp and the Mimic Tear. Not only that, but the developer also added additional NPC quest options, NPC tracking, and more.
If you’re looking for some guidance when exploring the Lands Between, check out our Elden Ring guides hub.
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