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THE RAYS BETWEEN

Elden Ring's long promised ray tracing support finally arrives, but there's some bad news

Elden Ring has finally delivered on the promise of adding ray tracing to The Lands Between, with some caveats.

Sherif Saed avatar
News by Sherif Saed Contributor
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FromSoftware released a major new Elden Ring patch earlier this morning on all platforms. Servers have gone down for three hours for extended maintenance, but the real news is in what the patch brings to the game.

Proper patch notes have just been published. The headline change, of course, is the arrival of ray tracing.

Yes, it is.

As pointed out by Souls modder Lance McDonald on Twitter, patch 1.09 officially adds ray tracing support to the game. So far, it's only confirmed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. The patch is considerably bigger on PS5, coming in at 5GB, compared to PC's slim 200MB.

That's likely because the console patch includes pre-compiled shaders, meaning the PC version would need to compile shaders upon first launch after installing the patch, similar to many other modern games.

There's now a Ray Tracing Quality option in the game's Graphics menu on PC, which players can tweak to their liking. Interestingly, however, while there's a general setting for ray tracing, the menu does not say what ray tracing is used for specifically.

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Based on McDonald's earlier work digging into recent Elden Ring patches, ray tracing is enabled for ambient occlusion, as well as shadows - but no ray traced reflections.

Unfortunately, today's update does not bring support for any upscaling techniques on PC, meaning no DLSS, or FSR. This is particularly disappointing because Elden Ring does not have its own reconstruction tech, so it's going to be fairly performance costly for many players. Hopefully something similar could be added in a future patch.

Imagine how good time of day changes are going to look with ray tracing.

FromSoftware is aware of the cost, of course, and warns players that it may impact resolution and performance. The developer has even published updated PC specs when running ray tracing. The two sets of specs, which we've added below, both target 1080p resolution. Considering the PC parts listed, that's quite disappointing.

Elden Ring minimum ray tracing specs

  • OS: Windows 10
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB
  • Target graphics settings: 1080p - Low quality – Low Ray Tracing

Elden Ring recommended ray tracing specs

  • OS: Windows 11
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16 GB
  • Target graphics settings: 1080p - High quality – High Ray Tracing

You can see the full change log for patch 1.09 at the link. It's mostly focused on PvP balance, but there's a host of bug fixes and balance tweaks for the main game, too.

You may recall that ray tracing support was announced all the way back in November 2021, several months before Elden Ring's release. FromSoftware never revealed any specefics about the feature since then, however.

FromSoftware certainly likes to take its time, having just recently announced Shadow of the Erdtree DLC - which does not even have a release window, and seemingly won't be here until after the release of the studio's Armored Core 6, which also doesn't have a release date.

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