Valve is Working on Elden Ring’s Steam Deck Performance Woes

Valve is Working on Elden Ring's Steam Deck Performance Woes

Steam Deck emails are just now rolling out for the first wave of preorders, but reports of Elden Ring’s stuttering handheld performance are already circulating. Valve is aware of the issue, and one coder has already posted an update sharing gameplay improvements.

Valve’s got a long list of “Steam Deck Verified” it says work great on the device “right out of the box.” Since its hardware reveal, the company has maintained that it was reviewing the entire Steam catalog and categorizing games by their compatibility. Right now, there’s three ratings scoring performance and a fourth marking games as Unknown until they’re reviewed. Elden Ring currently sports the Verified title, meaning its passed quality checks on input, display, system support, and compatibility options.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean it’s without its problems, and Valve is already on it with an experimental build of the performance patch available now. As spotted by Eurogamer, Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais shared an update on FromSoftware’s latest project, and provided a brief clip of the new and old versions running side-by-side.

“The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck,” wrote Griffais. “Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental.”

The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck. Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental. pic.twitter.com/5oSnXtF2OG

— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) February 26, 2022

The issues you see on Steam Deck are familiar to PC users, but Griffais tweeted the performance problems were “still possible to optimize/mitigate in the various driver layers” on Valve’s hardware. Since launch last week, folks playing on PC have reported problems with Easy Anti-Cheat crashes, frame rate issues, and other gameplay hiccups.

Bandai Namco says the Elden Ring team is already on it, so maybe you’ll get cleaned-up versions of Elden Ring on PC and Steam Deck soon. The publisher shared those plans in a blog post last Friday, acknowledging the problems with its cheat software, and asked users to update drivers while other performance woes are addressed. Bamco acted to address the situation fairly quickly—at least, that was way faster than how long it took them to acknowledge the Dark Souls RCE vulnerability.

Author: Deann Hawkins