Bonus Material: Elden Ring Steam Deck vs PS4 Teaser (Patreon)

Hello - Rich here, slowly piecing together my piece on Elden Ring on Steam Deck and whether/how Valve has optimised PC performance. Part of this project involves comparing the settings I ended up settling on with the PS4 version and perhaps not surprisingly, they are quite close - medium preset, high textures, high anti-aliasing and low shader quality (we're still not sure if the shader quality actually does anything). 

A few interesting points here: Firstly, I'm using Valve's system-level 30fps cap on the Deck and it's obviously more stable than From's now-notorious 30fps frame-pacing presentation. Secondly, dragon fire can cause GPU-related performance drops and in the last two clips, it is interesting to compare them. And finally, CPU-related issues appear to kick in when there are many entities on-screen - as you'll see in the second clip. Also note that the physics update on destructible objects when the dragon obliterates them is very low - pretty much the same on both systems.

There seems to be a dynamic element to Elden Ring's rendering systems, which explains the motion blur turning off and on in the current-gen consoles' performance modes. We've got a very interesting 'side project' video on Elden Ring coming up where we hammered this point down - turns out that running Xbox One X code on Series X throws up all manner of surprises. Look out for that one soon!

Downloads: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2022-03-03-elden-ring-steam-deck-vs-ps4-performance-analysis