Elden Ring — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 3% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Texture Quality at High (3% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Elden Ring: Elden Ring's texture streaming pool scales directly with this setting, targeting approximately 2–3 GB VRAM at High and pushing toward 4–5 GB at Maximum. On GPUs with 6 GB or more the difference between High and Maximum is purely visual with no frame-time cost. Below that threshold, Maximum triggers streaming stalls particularly during fast traversal on Torrent — stutters manifest as brief frame-time spikes rather than sustained FPS loss. Medium is a safe floor that retains readable surface detail on armour and stonework.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Elden Ring: This is the heaviest individual setting in Elden Ring's PC build. The engine renders cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun light, and Maximum nearly doubles the shadow map resolution compared to High while also increasing cascade coverage distance. The cost is most severe in areas with dense geometry casting shadows — Stormveil Castle, the Erdtree's root networks in Deeproot Depths, and open fields at dusk. Dropping from Maximum to High typically recovers 10–18 FPS with shadows that remain sharp at gameplay distances.

Typical impact 2-15% · 4% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at High (4% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Elden Ring: Elden Ring offers only three AA states: Off, Low (a lightweight post-process filter similar to FXAA), and High (TAA-derived temporal accumulation). High mode introduces mild image ghosting on fast weapon swings and camera pans, which some players find distracting during boss fights. Low trades some aliasing on foliage edges for a sharper, ghost-free image. The FPS delta between Low and High is small — under 3% — so the choice is mostly aesthetic. No DLSS or FSR path exists to replace AA with upscaling.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (4% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Elden Ring: Elden Ring's AO implementation runs as a screen-space post-process pass over the deferred lighting output. At High, the pass produces well-defined contact shadows under armour trim, in cave crevices, and beneath the Legacy Dungeon architecture — areas like Raya Lucaria Academy benefit the most visually. The cost scales from roughly 2% at Low to around 6–8% at High. Medium offers a good balance: shadow detail in recessed geometry is preserved while the heavier sample count of High is avoided. Note that enabling the ray-traced AO option overrides this setting.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Motion Blur at On (1% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Elden Ring: Elden Ring's motion blur is a per-object and camera-motion vector blur applied as a post-process. At default it is tuned for cinematic feel rather than competitive clarity — fast camera sweeps and rolling produce noticeable streaking. The GPU cost is a single low-cost fullscreen pass and is effectively negligible. Most players disable it for cleaner readability during boss fights and PvP invasions. There is no quality sub-option; it is a binary toggle.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Elden Ring: DoF in Elden Ring is applied to the background during conversations with NPCs and during certain cutscene-adjacent dialogue moments, using a Gaussian CoC blur. During active gameplay it is minimal. The toggle has virtually no impact on sustained combat or exploration frame rates — the pass is conditionally activated. Disabling it produces a sharper background during NPC interactions at the cost of a small cinematic quality reduction. Performance-conscious players can safely leave it off.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Grass Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls grass blade density, draw distance, and rendering method. Grass is typically rendered via GPU instancing — a single blade mesh is instanced thousands of times with per-instance transforms stored in structured buffers. Higher settings increase instances per square meter and extend the draw distance. Each grass blade is an alpha-tested quad or multi-polygon mesh, producing significant overdraw in dense fields. Wind animation is computed in the vertex shader using procedural noise functions. Some engines use mesh shaders or indirect draw for grass, reducing CPU-side instancing overhead.

In Elden Ring: Limgrave and Altus Plateau have extremely dense grass fields. High quality renders full-density grass with wind physics — noticeable FPS drop in open areas.

Typical impact 3-15% · 6% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Effect Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Elden Ring: Controls particle density and complexity for spell effects, weapon arts, and environmental phenomena such as the Erdtree's golden light shafts and rot-spore particle clouds in Caelid. At Maximum, boss arenas with overlapping incantation explosions and ash-of-war activations produce heavy particle overdraw. This setting is most relevant in multiplayer scenarios — co-op boss fights with three players each casting AoE spells can stress fill rate at High/Maximum. Dropping to Medium reduces per-emitter particle count and removes some secondary spark/debris passes while keeping the primary VFX readable.

Typical impact 5-18% · 6% fps cost

In Elden Ring, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (6% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Elden Ring: Elden Ring's volumetric fog is visible across nearly the entire map — the Lands Between uses pervasive atmospheric scattering to define zone mood, from Limgrave's morning haze to the Mountaintops of the Giants' blizzard conditions. The engine allocates a froxel grid and ray-marches it against the shadow map each frame. At High the froxel resolution is sufficient to produce well-defined light shafts through Stormveil's broken roof sections. Low reduces froxel density noticeably in enclosed spaces. The GPU cost ranges from roughly 5% at Low to 12–15% at High — a meaningful lever on mid-range hardware.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Elden Ring, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Elden Ring: Added in patch 1.09. Elden Ring RT only covers ambient occlusion — not reflections or GI. Modest FPS impact (5-10%) but subtle visual improvement.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Elden Ring, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.