Elden Ring is here, but on PC, the port is not good. Unfortunately, Elden Ring is the first terrible port in a long line of decent PC ports from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware. Elden Ring doesn't just perform badly, stuttering and dropping major frames, but it doesn't come with many modern conveniences like an unlocked framerate or even ultrawide support. The modding community has an answer, though, because an unlocked framerate mod is here. In this article, we'll explain the Elden Ring PC framerate/FPS unlock mod.
Elden Ring's Framerate/FPS on PC
In the graphics settings for Elden Ring, you won't find any options for a framerate. When you play the game, you play at 60 FPS. If you really want to, you can use your graphics card software to force a 30 FPS cap, but there's ultimately very little reason to do that.
Outside of this, though, that's it. There aren't any options, outside of mods, that can make your experience any more playable. On top of that, regardless of where you cap your FPS (which is to say 30 FPS or 60 FPS, nothing more) you're still not going to have a smooth experience.
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Stutter as well as major FPS fluctuations are commonplace, especially as you traverse the open world and particularly if you choose to do so while on horseback. Ultimately, regardless of your particular configuration or what settings you've got, you're going to stutter and drop frames.
This is an engine issue. FromSoftware has to patch the game on PC for these issues to ever, really, meaningfully go away. Mods, in time, may make the situation better, but patches are really the only way the problem with Elden Ring on PC gets solved.
These problems don't go away with the FPS unlock mod. Even if you unlock your framerate and enjoy higher framerates, you're still going to stutter, and sometimes, performance will tank anyways in certain areas, with or without the mod.
Related: Elden Ring Performance Problems/Issues Explained
In time, these issues may get better, and they likely will improve, but for the present, Elden Ring on PC is inevitably not going to play smoothly. Using the mod, though, may make life better, and if you have a variable refresh rate monitor you may end up having a fairly decent experience on PC.
Elden Ring's Framerate/FPS Unlock Mod
On GitHub, you can download EldenRingFpsUnlockAndMore by uberhalit, and this mod can do a variety of things to your copy of Elden Ring on PC.
First, you can unlock Elden Ring's FPS cap. You can run the game at whatever framerate you'd like, but the game doesn't scale terribly well, so you probably won't be getting 100s of frames in most places in the game, regardless of your rig.
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You can also play the game in different aspect ratios, like in 21:9, using this mod. Plus, you can use the mod to adjust FOV, which is another setting absent from the Elden Ring PC port. Altogether, the mod brings a ton of functionality to an otherwise barebones PC port.
It sounds great, but there are some serious drawbacks. For one, you can't play online, Elden Ring's anti-cheat doesn't play well with mods. You'll risk a ban if you play online with the mod enabled, so it's just not worth it. Some report using the mod and never being banned, but your mileage here will definitely vary.
When using the FPS unlock portion of the mod, you will have to run the game in borderless window mode. This will cut back performance a small bit, and you will stutter a bit more as a result. This usually isn't a huge deal, but with a stuttery game like Elden Ring, this can prove to be fairly annoying.
Related: Elden Ring PC Issues, Glitches, Bugs, Problems, and More Explained
With the FPS Unlock part of the mod, there's another major drawback: game speed. Game speed is affected by the framerate, and games peed will increase as framerates go past 60 FPS. The mod's creator has a bit of a cheeky explanation for this side effect. Essentially, he advises you to get good because you can just react a bit quick if need be.
This is true, and ultimately, the game speed change isn't the most game-breaking given the technical state of the game such that you won't realistically be averaging super-high framerates all that often. Plus, it's very much so possible to learn the muscle memory required for a moderate speed bump to combat encounters. Elden Ring plays a lot slower than Sekiro.
However, this is ultimately a pretty big compromise on top of running the game in borderless window mode and playing offline. For a game that's already going to perform pretty badly, these drawbacks make the new features introduced by the mod a little less groundbreaking.
Related: Will Elden Ring Have Mods or Official Mod Support?
A variable refresh rate monitor will help make the experience a lot smoother, but you will still have to deal with other issues. Using a tech like G-SYNC though will keep a wildly fluctuating framerate feel at least reasonably smooth, and going beyond 60 FPS brings a good deal of fluidity to the game.
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