Elden Ring Best Graphics Settings to Fix Stuttering and FPS Drops

This guide will show you the best graphics settings for Elden Ring for low-end gaming PCs. You will have a smoother experience in-game, and it might also help you eliminate various performance issues like Stuttering and FPS Drops, if you are having any, of course.

Best Elden Ring Graphics Settings

I tested the game on a RTX 3070, RTX 2060, GTX 1650, and a GTX 1050ti. And surprisingly, I experienced random stuttering and FPS Drops, with all 4 of my GPUs. There was some minor freezing, as well. I did face some other annoying errors and bugs, but that is a story for a different day.

Now, it is a known fact that not everyone is sitting with a high-end gaming rig. That is why I decided to make this graphics settings guide, catered towards the users who are experiencing problems like fps drops and stuttering during fights. Let’s check out the guide now:

Graphics Settings

  • Screen Mode: Fullscreen – You lose a good chunk of performance on “Windowed” or “Borderless Windowed” mode.
  • Resolution: 1920×1080 – This whole combination of Elden Ring settings is for the 1080p resolution. If you are on 1440p or higher, you might have to lower the settings even further.
  • Auto-Detect Best Rendering Settings: Off – We are going with Custom Settings here, so this is useless for us.
  • Quality Settings: Custom – Again, we are going with Custom Settings.
  • Texture Quality: Medium – Lowering Texture Quality from “Maximum” to “Medium”, will give you a decent performance boost. I saw no change in performance after switching to “Low”, though. Also, you won’t notice any sort of huge downgrade in visuals, if you lower this setting. Check out the difference:
    Elden Ring - Texture Quality Medium Vs Maximum
  • Antialiasing Quality: High – I found no change in performance, after lowering the AA setting. In fact, the edges of the game look extremely jagged with Low AA. My eyes were getting hurt, it was so bad. The game literally looks like, it is from 2010, or something. So keep this at High.
  • SSAO – Medium – This is one of those settings, that affect the visuals the most. If you didn’t know, SSAO is nothing but Ambient Occlusion. “Medium” is what I would recommend. Don’t lower this, unless you are really struggling to get ‘playable’ framerates. This makes the shadowy spots look darker, which in return, makes the game look slightly better. Check out the difference:
    Elden Ring - SSAO Medium vs SSAO Off
  • Depth of Field: Off – I personally don’t like DOP, as I hate losing focus of the background when I am targeting someone. In fact, this will actually give you an advantage over people who have set this to “On”. Your sides won’t blur out when you ADS, allowing you to focus on more targets.
  • Motion Blur: Off – Depends on your personal preference. Personally, I don’t like Blur in my games.
  • Shadow Quality: Medium – This does affect performance. But I just couldn’t let myself set this to “Low”. The game looks horrible with “Low” Shadows. The reason for that is a flashing effect on trees, caused by lower-quality leaf shadows suddenly flicking in and out of existence.
    Elden Ring Shadows Medium vs Low
  • Lighting Quality: High – I saw no difference in performance between “High” and “Low”. Didn’t notice much difference in visuals, too. So, “High” seems perfect here.
  • Effects Quality: Medium – This setting does affect performance. You won’t notice anything, when you are exploring or battling small enemies. It is during the boss fights, where your Framerate will take a hit, if you increase this setting. In fact, I was noticing some stuttering while fighting the Beastman of Farum Azula, whenever he was rushing towards me, with particles flying out of his body.
  • Volumetric Quality: Low – So, when I was testing the game on my RTX 2060, 3060 Ti, and 3070, setting this to “Maximum”, it showed absolutely no difference against “Low”. As soon as I popped in the 1650, the frame rate took a small dip. That is why I would recommend that you keep this at Medium or Low, if you have a weak GPU. There aren’t any huge visual differences, though.
  • Reflection Quality: Set this to anything – Honestly, I saw no difference in performance after setting this to low on the GTX 1650.
  • Water Surface Quality: Low – I didn’t come by any area with water during my testing. So, I couldn’t test this setting properly. But, I am sure that the difference between various quality would be extremely minor.
  • Shader Quality: Medium – This is a demanding setting. Lowering this to “Medium” from “Maximum”, gave be a generous 4-5 FPS boost on the GTX 1650. Yes, you will notice a slight downgrade in the visuals. But that is something you have to accept.
  • Global Illumination Quality – Set this to anything – Another setting that neither has any impact on the performance, not has any impact on the visuals of the game.
  • Grass Quality: Medium – Probably, the most demanding setting of the lot. “Medium” is good enough here. Lowering this any further will make the vegetation look weird, and increasing this would take a toll on your FPS. Check out the difference:
    Elden Ring Grass Quality Medium vs Low

Elden Ring Best Graphics Settings

I could have easily decided to set everything to the lowest possible. But I didn’t want the game to look too bad. The settings given above will give decent performance, without sacrificing too much on the visuals department.

Elden Ring System Requirements

Before moving on to the performance analysis, check out the official system requirements for Elden Ring once:

Elden Ring PC Requirements

Specifications of Test system

CPU Ryzen 5 5600x
GPU Zotac GTX 1650
RAM 16 GB DDR4 3200mhz
SSD Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 TB + 500 GB
Monitor Resolution 1920×1080
Graphics Driver Nvidia Game Ready Driver v511.79 [Release Date: 02/14/2022]

I am seeing a lot of articles and videos, where content creators are testing Elden Ring on RTX 3080s, 3090s, RX 6800 XTs, etc. What is the point? We all know what the GPU market is like at the moment. How many users are really sitting with those GPUs? According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, the top 5 most used GPUs at the moment are, GTX 1060, 1050ti, 1650, RTX 2060, and GTX 1050. Anyway, let’s move on to the performance analysis.

Elden Ring – Performance Analysis

Minimum FPS (1% Low) Average FPS Maximum FPS
36 FPS 49 FPS 57 FPS

First, let’s take a look at how the game looks with the settings given above:

Elden RIng running at Medium Settings on GTX 1650

Looks quite good, honestly. But I would still say that Elden Ring, on PC, is not one of the most optimized games I have seen to date. Though a lot of you might argue that 49 FPS is a good enough frame rate, I don’t necessarily agree. Surveys show that most gamers don’t like their games to run below 60 FPS. I think, FromSoftware, could have done a better job in the performance department. Don’t get me wrong, Elden Ring is an awesome game, and people playing it on consoles, won’t even notice anything. But if you are on PC, a game running smoothly at 60 FPS is always going to impress you. Furthermore, the fps of Elden Ring is locked at 60. This means having a monitor with 144hz or 240hz refresh rate, won’t yield you any benefits.

I did test the game on my i3 8100 and GTX 1050 ti build, as well. And setting all the settings to “Low”, did allow me to get a nice 50 FPS average. The visuals were looking horrible, though. But still, if you are GTX 1050 Ti user, and you have been wondering all this time that whether Elden Ring will run properly for you or not. You now have your answer. You will have to be okay with the stuttering and fps drops, though.

If you want, you can actually check out this benchmark video of Elden Ring PC, running on a RTX 3060 ti, paired with a Ryzen 5 5600x. All settings are maxed out:

How to fix Stuttering, Lag and FPS Drops in Elden Ring

After applying the settings given above, if you are still facing stutters and fps drops, then you can try the steps below:

  • Turn off Nvidia Instant Replay
  • Turn off Windows Background Recording
  • Disable Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. As suggested by this user
  • You may also be running a computer with two video cards. Make sure the game is using your dedicated graphics card instead of the integrated one
  • Go to your Nvidia Control Panel > Click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings > Select ‘Use my preference emphasizing‘, and set it to ‘Performance
  • Eliminate heavy applications like Razer Synapse, Wallpaper Engine, etc.

Update 12/26/2023

If you have a good GPU, and you are still experiencing stuttering, fps drops and freezing. Try this fix from Steam user /Assasinfaiter:

I have RTX 3070 ti, Ryzen 5 5600X, 16Gb Ram. But I have strong freezes and stuttering. And here’s what helped me. After that the game started working great!

Solution to the problem:
For increased frame rate: just set the global “Shader Cache Size” setting in NVIDIA Control Panel to “Unlimited”


So, that is all on “Elden Ring Best Graphics Settings to Fix Stuttering and FPS Drops”. For more Elden Ring guides, keep an eye on Frondtech. We will be covering every single technical issue of the game on the launch day. Good luck!


That’s all, folks!

Last Updated on December 26, 2023

1 thought on “Elden Ring Best Graphics Settings to Fix Stuttering and FPS Drops”

  1. I tried a lot and nothing helped. If you use Windows 10 and a 12th Gen Intel CPU (like the i7-12700k), you need to disable the E-Cores in BIOS. This works perfekt. On Maximum settings, everything ist smoot, even on horse. Zero lag, FPS drops, stuttering etc. [This is not helping, if you have low Framerates in general because of an unsufficiant CPU/GPU, though. It’s only about the rather erratic, heavy FPS drops.]

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