Elden Ring’s PS5 Ray Tracing Mode Drops Below 30 FPS

With the recently-released patch installed, players can now experience the Elden Ring PS5 ray tracing mode. While the additional visual flair was expected to have some negative impact on performance, the addition of RT comes at a greater cost than many would have imagined. Enabling ray tracing on PS5 causes the frame rate to sometimes drop below 30 FPS.

Elden Ring PS5 ray tracing is “far from ideal”

As explained by Digital Foundry in the video embedded below, enabling ray tracing within Elden Ring results in a drop of 15-20 FPS on average. The mode also drops the resolution, leading to a less sharp image.

The frame rate drop causes the game to dip below the PS5’s VRR window, meaning that not even the latest television tech can help smoothen out the performance problems. What’s more, with dips below 30 FPS, not even a frame rate cap can clean up the mess.

Following its analysis, Digital Foundry concludes that ray tracing on PS5 is “far from ideal,” though unsurprising as “it’s the price you’d expect to pay for extra visual features layered on top of an experience that was already sub-60 FPS.”

Elden Ring is a game where inconsistent performance can mean the difference between life and death, so I imagine most players will look to disable ray tracing, at least for combat sequences.

Hopefully FromSoftware’s next game, which it has been working on since 2022, won’t have these performance problems.