One of the most intriguing stories to emerge from the launch of Steam Deck was the news that Valve leveraged their Linux-based Proton compatibility layer to effectively fix the problematic PC version of Elden Ring. Directly after finishing my Steam Deck review, I captured Elden Ring running ‘out of the box’ without Valve’s optimisations in play, then tried out the ‘fixed’ experience. Were the issues truly resolved – and if so, how did Valve do it? In addition to that, we’ve since had a couple of further patches, which raises another crucial question: is Elden Ring on PC now fixed?
Going back to our launch PC coverage, the stutter in the game was unbearable, with our working theory being that we were looking at yet another PC game suffering from shader compilation issues: split-second pauses whenever a new visual effect came into play. We’ve talked about this a lot recently: it’s not an issue on consoles because the fixed nature of the hardware means that shaders are pre-compiled and included in the package. However, in a PC, where hardware spec varies so dramatically, the process is more complicated. In this respect, Steam Deck has an advantage, because it is a fixed piece of hardware, just like a console.
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