Elden Ring: Nightreign Optimized Settings
Although the technology and visuals haven't changed much from Elden Ring, neither have some of the more pertinent performance issues. Still capped at 60 fps, the newest title from FromSoftware can often struggle to maintain a smooth framerate.
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Here are our Elden Ring: Nightreign optimized settings, aiming to keep you as close to a capped 60 fps experience as possible, minimizing the chances of impactful dips in the middle of the action.
Elden Ring: Nightreign Optimized Settings
We want to start this off by praising and simultaneously criticizing FromSoftware. Nightreign's setting menu does something excellent: changes take effect immediately behind the semi-transparent menu so you can exactly see what impact it in both the visuals and performance. So what's the problem?
That's only true for some settings. Others will not have go into effect until you return to the title menu. The worst part is that the game doesn't even tell you which, so you're left to guess or to experiment one by one to figure it out. With that little rant out of the way, let's get into our optimized settings.
First and foremost, we recommend Borderless Window. You'll likely be playing this with friends on Discord and sometimes alt-tabbing to do something. There is no performance difference between Fullscreen and Borderless, and the latter will be much more friendly to alt-tabbing. The game also supports HDR if your display is compatible, but we weren't able to test its implementation for this piece.
To customize your graphics you'll have to select the Graphics tab and head into the Advanced settings. There you'll find the menu captured below. Our Elden Ring Nightreign optimized settings are as follows:
Image via FromSoftware. Screenshot captured by Blast.tv.- Texture Quality- Maximum (even 8GB GPUs should be fine here at 1440p).
- Antialiasing Quality- High.
- SSAO- High.
- Depth of Field- Low (marginal performance increase for no visual impact that we could notice).
- Motion Blur- Off.
- Shadow Quality- High. No visual difference between High and Maximum.
- Lighting Quality- Medium.
- Effects Quality- Medium. Take this down to low if you're having dips in the middle of effects-heavy fights.
- Volumetric Lighting Quality- Medium.
- Reflection Quality- High.
- Water Surface Quality- High.
- Shade Quality- High.
- Global Illumination Quality- Medium.
- Grass Quality- Medium. This setting impacts how much grass will be on the game. It has a very impactful visual impact, but will also boost your FPS considerably. Grass will still look good on Medium, but there will just be less patches of it.
We want to warn you that no settings you choose will net you a perfectly smooth experience. Much like the original title, Elden Ring: Nightreign suffers from frametime issues that cannot be fixed now matter how strong your hardware is or how low your settings are. From our testing, this setup is the most balanced between performance and graphics, maintaining a similar visual quality to the High and Maximum presets.
Furthermore, some performance issues in Nightreign specifically are caused by network issues, since the game is always online. Those will not be impact by graphics settings either.
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