The success of Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s most recent colossal production, was also accompanied by some performance headaches. The word most used in this area by players is “stuttering”, so to speak. However, Valve has managed to optimize the game on the Steam Deck and it is interesting to investigate the matter.
We have already reported on these pages the arrival of the update for Steam Deck, or for Valve’s portable device, but now ArsTechnica wanted to investigate how the company behind well-known series such as Half-Life has managed to optimize the FromSoftware’s title on its hardware. Well, the key concept in this area is that of pre-caching.
Put simply, as detailed by Digital Foundry on YouTube, the PC version of Elden Ring would seem to make use only of the DirectX 12 API on Windows 10. Without getting too technical, essentially according to the source the game would not carry out a “complete preparation”, thus going to encounter possible “slowdowns” when it then finds itself generating events “on the run” . Reference is made to a new explosion or animation, just to give concrete examples.
Here we have tried to make the complex question understandable to everyone, but the problem would lie, more precisely, in a shader compilation process that is not exactly the most efficient. Net of the question, however, it is interesting to understand how Valve has managed in some ways to “patch” the issues of the title of FromSoftware, actually going to intervene “externally” to try to optimize the performance of third-party video games on Steam Deck (it is not just Elden Ring, but in this period clearly everyone is referring to the latter).
As the more experienced among you will have already guessed, here the pre-caching of the shaders comes into play, that is, we refer to the reproduction of the physical behavior of the materials (the latter make up an object, to which the shaders are applied). Valve has therefore seen fit to pass, through the Proton compatibility layer, the API calls related to the Steam Deck hardware for Vulkan, in order to optimize performance. If you have not understood anything, we will make it short: in fact, a better “preparation” of the elements necessary for the game is carried out. This can’t happen on Windows 10, as Elden Ring is a DirectX 12 title, but Steam Deck is based on Arch Linux, ergo it is actually possible to carry out this operation.
It is therefore no coincidence that several titles are receiving updates on Steam Deck indicated as “shader pre-caching update” in this March 2022. Clearly, this type of update cannot increase the “pure performance” of Valve’s hardware (therefore all remain the limitations of the case), but according to some reports, the “stuttering situation” of Elden Ring would have improved considerably following the update on Steam Deck.
In short, it was interesting to deepen the question, also to note how sometimes having specific hardware in your hands, even in the PC field, can be useful. However, don’t expect to be able to have a similar update on your classic gaming computer, as, as previously stated, Valve was able to work in this way only for the Steam Deck.