Thanks to Valve, Elden Ring is better on the Steam Deck than on PC

Elden Ring on PC has had some serious stuttering and optimization issues, but Valve seems to have fixed the issues, as originally reported by Kotaku. Valve has corrected several issues for the PC version on Steam Deck, so Steam Deck users can enjoy the best version of the game right now.

In February, Pierre-Loup Griffais, a Valve programmer, took to Twitter to say that an Elden Ring patch was on the way. Thankfully, it has finally arrived, and Steam Deck users get to enjoy the game with fewer issues.

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Valve improves Elden Ring experience for Steam Deck users

Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve tweeted in late February about the graphics team of the Steam Deck currently working on the game. The team was apparently working on fixes for the game's major stuttering problems, which have finally been resolved.

Click here to find Melina Elden Ring

Valve is able to manage the game's resources on the Steam Deck and are pre-caching the the game's shaders to create a smoother experience for players. After all, Elden Ring is a gorgeous, highly-detailed game, and the deeper a player goes, the more details they can see.

Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned on Twitter that the fix was for heavy stutters during background streaming of assets, and would soon be available in a Proton release in the following week. Since Steam Deck is a Linux system, this update will likely also improve Linux users’ experience as well.

The developer went into the finer details with Eurogamer about how this works:

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. 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.

It sounds like the best version of the game isn’t on PC, PlayStation 5, or on the Xbox Series X, but on the Steam Deck instead. However, it’s still not perfect yet. Playing the game at 30 FPS instead of the usual 60 offers a better experience and is capped at 720p resolution.

Even with these caveats, Elden Ring is still best played on the Steam Deck right now. Unfortunately, this has not yet arrived for PC users, but hopefully, fixes will be rolled out to make it as good as the portable version of the game.

For the complete Elden Ring PS4, click here.