As per renowned Dark Souls modder Lance McDonald, ray tracing is limited to ambient occlusion and shadows — no ray-traced reflections.
Ray-tracing is not available on Elden Ring's PS4 and Xbox One versions
Photo Credit: FromSoftware
Elden Ring has finally received its long-promised ray-tracing update, courtesy of patch 1.09. The feature is now live on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X, with renowned Dark Souls modder Lance McDonald affirming that it's unfortunately limited to ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion. While Elden Ring's settings menu does include a ray-tracing toggle, there are no options for Nvidia DLSS or AMD's upscaling options to ensure better framerates when playing on high-fidelity graphics settings. There are no ray-traced reflections either and most visible changes are only seen outdoors, eliminating glowy edges on nearby rocks.
McDonald, who rose to prominence by creating the much-needed Bloodborne 60fps mod, notes that the PS5 ray-tracing patch is larger, coming in at 5GB, while the PC update is merely 200MB in size. That's because the PS5 version comes with precompiled shaders, which are ready to go once downloaded and installed. On PC, however, Elden Ring will need to compile/ install shaders upon the first launch after downloading the update — a common occurrence with most modern PC games. Still, nothing compared to Hogwarts Legacy on PC, which compiles shaders upon every launch. FromSoftware is aware of the lack of upscaling options, and therefore, in its recommended system requirements, lists 1080p resolution as the limit. Anything beyond that could potentially slow down your experience.
Here are the ray-tracing system requirements for Elden Ring, from publisher Bandai Namco:
Elden Ring minimum ray tracing PC requirements
Elden Ring recommended ray tracing PC requirements
Elden Ring's patch 1.09 also brings several balance adjustments to the game, ranging from scaling in online PvP to making changes to several Ashes of War. You can read the entire patch log on the official Bandai Namco website. The company previously dropped a fun infographic revealing that players had collectively died over 9 billion times in Elden Ring, with key culprits being damage from enemies, falls to death, status effects, and online PvP. The stats also revealed that players attempted boss battles nearly 6 billion times, of which 329 million was Malenia, Blade of Miquella alone.
A few days after celebrating its one-year anniversary, FromSoftware announced the first major expansion for Elden Ring — Shadow of the Erdtree, which is currently in development for all platforms. At the time, we also got a teaser art of a dimly-lit scenery, featuring a mysterious blonde figure riding Torrent — our steed in-game — looking far into the distance at two intertwined trees casting shadows and leaking some golden sap. It is assumed that the figure is Miquella, brother to the Empyrian goddess Malenia, who was cursed to remain a child forever. Bandai Namco also confirmed last month that Elden Ring had sold over 20 million copies since its launch in February 2022.
Elden Ring is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. The ray-tracing update feature won't be available on the PS4 and Xbox One versions.
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