Elden Ring runs well on Steam Deck, to the point of surprise: although FromSoftware’s title suffers from various problems on PC, the handheld produced by Valve has overcome them thanks to a careful optimization process that Digital Foundry has documented.
So if the performance of the PC version of Elden Ring is bad, surprisingly on Steam Deck it was possible to obtain a stable frame rate by adjusting the settings and introducing changes in the way the game handles certain elements.
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained that the handheld has an advanced pre-caching system, which allows you to speed up certain loading operations by the games, as in the case of the title developed by FromSoftware.
However, the stutters related to shaders do not represent the majority of the problems of the game, which apparently also uses memory in an unusual way at certain times, sending the system manager into overdrive: using the cache here in an aggressive manner, this drawback is been substantially reduced.
It is possible that the same happens on consoles, hence the frame pacing and stuttering problems also reported by Digital Foundry: maybe knowing it will help the Japanese team so that they can solve the thing with the next updates.