A new video takes an in-depth look at how the newly added Ray Tracing in the Elden Ring performs on all current generation systems except Xbox Series S.

The wizards at Digital Foundry have taken an in-depth look at how Elden Ring’s newly added Ray Tracing performs on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X. The new performance setting comes as part of the Elden Ring 1.09 update.

FromSoftware has developed a habit over the past year of arbitrarily announcing quite significant news about its flagship titles, with the Colosseum update and the Shadow of the Erdtree reveal being two of the most notable examples.

The latest patch has done so again, bringing Ray Tracing to Lands Between more than a year after its release.

Digital Foundry, a group dedicated to technical analysis of video games, is here to help with the Elden Ring Ray Tracing features. The team didn’t hold back last year when it boldly declared that Elden Ring’s PC performance “just isn’t good enough”. Though not so damning this time, Digital Foundry questions whether ray tracing was the best development feature. Especially when there are so many other tools that the community has been asking for over a year.

As for Ray Tracing itself, the feature is coming to PC and all current-generation consoles. Except, as usual, the Xbox Series S. Xbox Series X’s Ray Tracing mode maintains a frame rate of just over thirty frames per second. Presumably, the lower-powered Xbox console would not have been able to deliver a meaningful experience with the feature. There appears to be no difference between the PS5 and Xbox Series X ray tracing modes. Both provide nearly identical quality regarding RT shadows, ambient occlusion and foliage/geometry drawing distance. Both target the exact resolution and appear to use dynamic resolution scaling.

Both consoles also compare favourably to the PC’s maximum ray tracing settings, the latter only providing less pop-in for foliage, especially grass.

Performance is significantly reduced on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X when Ray Tracing is turned on. Gamers can expect a loss of around fifteen frames per second when enabled without changing other settings. In summary, Digital Foundry believes that the addition of Ray Tracing is a welcome surprise. But little more than that. Efforts should perhaps have been more focused on providing higher frame rates on PC. Or to maintain a smoother frame rate on consoles.

Source: YouTube