How to enable ray tracing in Elden Ring: Performance & more

Elden Ring may be just over a year old, however, a brand-new update has added support for ray tracing. We’ll walk you through how to enable it, and what kind of performance impact you can expect.

Elden Ring was one of the most popular games of 2022, and alongside it came criticism for its relatively poor optimization, which remains to this day. Between all platforms, you can expect inconsistent frame times, which can lead to stuttering issues across even the most powerful of systems.

As of patch 1.09, Elden Ring has now added support for ray tracing. This was a highly-requested feature from fans, who have been clamoring for it for months. Though, the difference that the new feature makes is fairly minimal, and barely noticeable to the naked eye, without any tricksy pixel peeping.

How to use ray tracing in Elden Ring

To enable ray tracing in Elden Ring, simply open up the system menu, and then navigate to the “graphics” section. Here, you’ll be able to see a newly added “Ray Tracing” option. This should be available on PC, PS% and Xbox Series versions of the game.

Here, you can toggle the settings between four options: Off, low, medium, high, and maximum.

To turn ray tracing on and off, you have to head to the start menu, though if you have ray tracing enabled and wish to toggle between quality modes, you can do so while in-game.

Elden Ring ray tracing performance on PC

Elden Ring with ray tracing enabled sadly exacerbates the frame time issues that the game already possesses. You may also find that ray tracing performance differs between the time of day and the area that you are in. We tested Elden Ring’s ray-tracing performance with an RTX 4070 Ti at 4K resolution, in order to get an understanding of what kind of performance you can expect with the game in different ray traced modes.

The following test was conducted at “The First Step” site of grace with the time set to “Morning”. Our system uses an RTX 4070 Ti, in addition to an AMD Ryzen 5 3600.

Elden Ring (4K, “Maximum” graphics settings)	Frame rate
RT Off	60 FPS
RT Low	44 FPS
RT Medium	42 FPS
RT High	39 FPS
RT Maximum	37 FPS

Unsurprisingly, GPU usage skyrocketed as soon as we turned ray tracing on. Our humble RTX 4070 Ti moved from around 60% usage with RT off, to over 85% with ray tracing turned on. With RT on, you can also observe a performance dip of at least 26%. With RT set to maximum, this gulf increases to 38%.

Considering the GPU that we are using to test is one of Nvidia’s latest and greatest, anyone attempting to use ray tracing on a lower-end RTX 20 or 30 series graphics card may struggle to run the game at a playable framerate. Those with RTX 40-series graphics cards may fare much better, especially at lower resolutions.

It’s also important to note that we also experienced increased amounts of stutter while testing the game with ray tracing on, which can make the game run incredibly inconsistently. The actual ray tracing effects are indeed incredibly subtle, with no “glow” around certain objects in the map while you are close to them, in addition to foliage getting additional shadows while using the feature. Though you’ll really have to squint if you want to see the difference that ray tracing makes to the game.

No DLSS, XeSS, or FSR

Currently, Elden Ring has no support for any supersampling options such as DLSS, which would indeed increase the performance of the game. Right now, it just seems like this addition of ray tracing seems a little bit half-baked. It’s possible that FromSoftware will add these features, but considering that the game is over a year old at this point, we’re not holding out too much hope.