Elden Ring might be a beautiful game, but it doesn’t run so well on PC. Patch 1.02.1 had to fix an issue where graphics cards were just not being used. While the game has had a rough go on PC, it’s been more stable on Valve’s Steam Deck.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais explains that game-side resources play a big role in the stuttering that PC players were seeing. “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,” Griffais stated. “We cache such allocations more aggressively now, which seems to have helped a ton. We’ve been playing on Deck with all these elements in place, and the experience has been very smooth.”
Command buffers tell a game when to render certain parts of the world, be they textures or lighting. When you consider the sheer scale of Elden Ring, you can start to understand why so many of these buffers are in place — the moment you fast travel or enter a vast new area, the game has to render what you’re seeing in the region. PC parts vary wildly, while the Steam Deck is a standard piece of hardware. While Elden Ring on PC has to run processes that determine the best way to render everything you’re seeing every time you see it, it can do the same thing on Steam Deck every time because there’s a standard “unique GPU/driver combination to target.” To put it even more plainly, Elden Ring ‘gets used to’ running on a Steam Deck versus having to try harder based on the variable hardware in a PC.
If all that sounds complicated to you, then you probably shouldn’t mess with the Steam Deck if you own one. Pierre-Loup Griffais previously recommended that you go to a pro for any repairs you might need on the device.
