Elden Ring Best PC Settings for a Smooth 60fps

Elden Ring's PC version rewards a light touch. Because the frame rate is capped, tuning is about frametime consistency and taming the game's well-known stutter, not chasing FPS - here is what to change and what to leave alone.

The 60fps cap is real, not a bug you can toggle

Like every mainline FromSoftware PC release, Elden Ring runs with a fixed 60fps ceiling and VSync effectively forced on - in fullscreen it will drive the display at 60Hz even on a 144Hz panel. There is no in-menu option to raise this, and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion did not change it. So the honest target for any settings pass is a rock-steady 60 with a flat frametime line, because you cannot buy yourself extra frames above the cap.

Third-party tools and Nexus mods can unlock the frame rate, but the game's physics and animation are tied to 60fps, so uncapping can speed up or break physics, cause crashes, and carry a ban risk in online play. Treat uncapping as an offline experiment, not a normal setup. For almost everyone, the smart play is to hit and hold 60 rather than fight the engine.

Understand the two kinds of stutter before you blame your GPU

Elden Ring has two separate stutter problems, and it helps to name them. The first is shader compilation stutter: the first time you enter a new area or trigger a new effect, the game compiles GPU shaders on the fly, producing brief hitches that ease off once that area's cache is built. The second is traversal stutter, where riding Torrent across the open world streams in fresh assets and the frametime spikes as it does. This streaming hitch is an engine-level trait that has never been fully patched out.

Being honest about this matters: no combination of graphics options makes the traversal stutter disappear. Settings can shrink how often and how hard it hits, and hardware like a fast SSD helps the streaming, but if you are expecting a perfectly smooth gallop across Limgrave you will be disappointed. Aim to reduce the spikes, not to eliminate them.

Apply the best-balance settings

1. From the Main Menu or in-game, open System, then move to the rightmost Graphics tab.
2. Set Screen Mode to Fullscreen for the most consistent frame pacing, or Borderless if you alt-tab a lot or want the rendering-resolution trick described below.
3. Set Resolution to your monitor's native value (for example 1920x1080) so the UI stays crisp.
4. Choose the High quality preset as your baseline - it looks close to Maximum but is noticeably lighter on frametime.
5. Set Motion Blur to Off and Depth of Field to Off; both cost performance for an effect many players dislike anyway.
6. Keep Shadow Quality and Lighting Quality at Medium or High - dropping shadows below High makes them flicker distractingly.
7. Lower Grass Quality, Reflection Quality (SSR), Volumetric Quality and SSAO a notch if you need more frametime headroom, testing in a grassy, open area rather than a dungeon.
8. Leave Texture Quality high unless your GPU is short on VRAM, since textures cost memory more than frame time.

Which settings actually move the needle

The cheapest wins are Motion Blur and Depth of Field - switch both off and you lose nothing important while gaining smoother, clearer motion. After that, the heaviest hitters in open, foliage-dense zones are Grass Quality and Volumetric Quality (fog and god-rays), followed by Reflection Quality, which drives screen-space reflections on water and wet surfaces. Trimming these first gives you the most frametime back for the least visual loss.

Handle Shadows and Lighting with more care. Elden Ring's shadow cascades flicker badly below High, so if you must save performance elsewhere, do it before you touch shadow quality. SSAO (contact shadows where objects meet) and Global Illumination add depth but are moderate costs you can dial down on weaker cards. Anti-Aliasing is worth keeping on: the Low option is a soft FXAA while High uses a cleaner TAA pass, and Elden Ring shimmers noticeably with AA off.

One important honesty note: the base game has no FSR or DLSS. Your only true resolution lever is the actual render resolution. In Borderless mode you can set a rendering resolution below your screen resolution and let the game scale it up - a rough, built-in way to buy performance - or set it above native to supersample if you have frames to spare.

Reduce (but do not expect to erase) the stutter

A few system-level tweaks measurably calm the hitching. Install the game on an SSD so asset streaming keeps up with Torrent. In your GPU driver, raise the shader cache: NVIDIA users can set Shader Cache Size to 10GB or higher in the NVIDIA Control Panel, and AMD users can enable Shader Cache and set it to maximum in Adrenalin. Switch Windows to the High Performance power plan so the CPU does not down-clock between frames, and close background apps that fight for CPU time.

Playing through an area once also warms its shader cache, so a zone you have already visited stutters far less on a return trip. None of this removes the streaming spikes entirely - it lowers their frequency and severity. If you still see screen tearing, keep the in-game VSync on rather than disabling it, since the 60fps cap and VSync are designed to work together here.

Borderless vs fullscreen

Fullscreen usually gives the most stable frame pacing and the cleanest 60fps, which is why it is the default recommendation for pure performance. Borderless Windowed trades a sliver of that stability for faster alt-tabbing, easier use with a second monitor, and access to the rendering-resolution scaling trick and certain community HDR workarounds. Neither mode removes the frame cap or forced VSync, so pick based on convenience: fullscreen if you play uninterrupted, borderless if you juggle other windows.