BEST Elden Ring PC Settings For FPS & Performance

Ah… I’ve finally found a reason to smash my old controller into bits while being consumed by rage and despair. That’s what Souls games are all about. And Elden Ring is a testament to the fact that they can still get tougher over the years. So, after a lot of painful hours and a few aching fingers, I’ve finally brought the best Elden Ring settings guide for PC.

Best Graphics Settings

Alright, let’s optimize Elden Ring’s performance by using the best Elden Ring settings for in-game graphics options. Elden Ring has a slew of graphical options you can tweak to find the sweet spot between performance and visuals

A Summary Of Best Settings

Screen Mode: Fullscreen

Set the Screen Mode to FullScreen to maximize the performance of the game. Exclusive FullScreen mode helps your PC divert resources to Elden Ring better increasing performance.

Resolution: Your Monitor’s Native Resolution

Using your monitor’s native resolution is the best option here. If you want to use a lower resolution, it’ll give you a huge boost in performance but also heavily degrade texture quality.

Auto-Detect Best Rendering Settings: Off

Auto-Detect Best Rendering Settings is a great feature in Elden Ring. It helps the game automatically decide the best rendering according to your hardware specs. This would be naturally be set to on. However, taking the game’s bad optimization into consideration, this option ends up slowing down the game with high rendering quality. Hence, it’s best turned off. 

Quality Settings: Custom

We’ll fine-tune each graphical setting Elden Ring has to offer. So, we won’t be selecting any particular Quality Setting Preset. Instead, it’ll be automatically set to custom.

Make sure to save these basic graphics settings before you jump into the “Advanced Settings” section.

This is where we’ll squeeze out as much performance as we can from Elden Ring. Try to configure them according to the following settings. You can later increase or reduce any particular setting according to your preference.

Texture Quality: Medium

Texture Quality is one of the most taxing settings compared to others. Lowering or increasing it will provide the most noticeable performance changes. Medium is a sweet spot between high performance and decent visuals.

Antialiasing Quality: High

Lowering Antialiasing Quality isn’t really worth it in Elden Ring graphics settings. High provides decent visuals without jagged edges at a minimal performance cost.

SSAO: Medium

Dropping SSAO from high to medium provides a decent performance improvement and doesn’t affect visuals that much. Medium is the best option to set SSAO on.

Motion Blur: Off

Motion Blur in Elden Ring is not necessary, even as just an aesthetic graphical feature. It’s because you’ll be dodging, rolling, and quickly spinning the camera around during enemy encounters. Having constant motion blur while fighting enemies can cause unnecessary blurriness and even negatively affect your gameplay. 

Shadow Quality: Maximum

Yes, put Shadow Quality to the maximum to avoid weird shimmering in textures. As far as I know, it’s a graphical bug that’ll get fixed in upcoming updates. But until that happens, keep Shadow Quality to Maximum. After it’s fixed in future updates, you can safely drop it down to Medium or Low.

Lighting Quality: High

Lowering Lighting Quality doesn’t really improve performance. Keep it too High to enjoy the fluorescent glow of the world around you in Elden Ring.

Effects Quality: High

Effects Quality also didn’t really improve performance when set to Medium or Low. Hence, keep it at High to avoid any unnecessary graphical downgrade. 

Volumetric Quality: High

Volumetric Quality enhances the overall look of the world of Elden Ring. However, lowering it too much didn’t really add to the performance. Keeping it at either Medium or High is the best option here.

Reflection Quality: Medium

At this point, I believe these settings are either broken or these settings work in mysterious ways. Lowering even Reflection Quality did not yield any performance improvement. Even though Reflection Quality is one of the most taxing settings in other games, in Elden Ring it has little to no effect on performance when lowered. To be on the safe side, keep Reflection Quality to Medium.

Water Surface Quality: High

Lowering Water Surface Quality didn’t really impact performance by quite a lot. Even while testing this setting I spent most of my time around water bodies. If you’re looking to gain even the slightest performance, you could keep it at Low.

Shader Quality: Medium

Shader Quality is a setting that finally gave me about 5-6 FPS, going from High to Medium. The visuals weren’t really affected that much so it was a good change overall.

Global Illumination Quality: High

Global Illumination Quality is also one of those settings that don’t really provide any improvement in performance when lowered. So it’s best to keep it at high to avoid reducing visual quality for nothing.

Grass Quality: Medium

Lowering Grass Quality from Maximum to Medium gave me over 7 FPS in-game which was a surprising improvement. You may get slightly better performance at low too but you’ll have to deal with low-quality grass.

And that’s about it. These are all the best Elden Ring graphics settings you need to use to get the max performance. 

Now keep in mind that simply lowering some of these settings to low won’t give you a significant impact on performance. However, if you wish to squeeze every ounce of performance, you may proceed to turn every setting low. However, the graphical downgrade isn’t really worth it. 

Nvidia Settings for Elden Ring PC

I recommend configuring your Nvidia Control Panel with the settings I’ve suggested below for maximum performance benefit.

Nvidia Settings Summary

You can also check out our complete dedicated Best Nvidia Control Panel Settings guide for further information.

AMD Settings for Elden Ring

If you own an AMD GPU, I also recommend that you optimize your Radeon panel settings as well.

AMD Settings Summary

Now that’s all, the AMD settings you just configured will be instantly applied and you’ll see a significant boost in Elden Ring’s performance.

Windows Optimization for Elden Ring

Now we’ll optimize different Windows components to get maximum performance. There are several optimization options and settings in Windows that can boost your in-game performance. Let’s begin tweaking them.

• Update Your Windows: To gain the best performance in games and regular PC use, updating your Windows is crucial as updates contain crucial performance tweaks, bug fixes, and security patches.
• Run the Game as Admin: Running Elden Ring with administrator privileges ensures that no other system policy or application affects your game’s performance. Most crashes or game stability issues get fixed once you run it as admin. You can do this by going into installation files > Right-clicking on main exe file > Properties > Compatibility Tab > Check-mark run as administrator. 
• Enable Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling: This feature takes the load off the CPU and lets the GPU push frames out faster resulting in better performance across the board. You can enable it by going into Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Choose default graphics settings > Enable the setting here.
• Terminate Unnecessary Background Programs: There are several programs running in your background that you don’t know about. They are only hogging your system resources leaving no breathing room for games causing performance issues. You can terminate the useless ones through Task Manager.
• Turn on Game Mode: It’s a feature baked into the windows that helps increase the game’s performance. It actively finds apps and programs and either closes or reduces resources towards them while the game is running. It helps the game perform better in most cases. You can turn it on in Settings > Gaming > Game Mode.

Before optimizing the game, I was averaging around 40 FPS with all settings turned to high at 1600p resolution. Turning down grass and reflections gave me an instant 15 FPS boost. Using the optimized settings I’ve suggested above, I could play the game at a solid 65-70 FPS without RT shadows. There were minor performance hiccups in fights with intense particle effects, but not very significant.

And there you have it, folks. After tons of hours invested into a Souls game, I never thought I’d play, I have got kinda of hooked. The agony of dying over and over again may break my spirit, but winning a fight after that struggle is what matters. Just like I finally managed to create this best setting guide for Elden Ring even though I struggle with Souls games. 

I really hope this guide provided some value to your experience with this legendary game. Hopefully, developers will start pushing out updates for the game that will include performance fixes. Until then, I hope our settings guide for Elden Ring provides you with a decent gaming experience. Until next time readers, peace!