Elden Ring Nightreign PC performance analysis: A bare-bones console port with glitches a-plenty

It's fair to say that FromSoftware's games eschew.

But that's what we've got, so if the thought of an original Elden Ring was capped to 60 fps and on some gaming PCs, it was cursed with an ever-present stutter. Well, Elden Ring Nightreign is no better, I'm afraid.

It's nowhere near as bad, thankfully, but regardless of what gaming PC you have, you'll still experience a hiccup or minor pause in the frame rate every now and then. It mostly happens while traversing the game's world, but it also crops up in hectic battles—precisely where you don't want it.

How much stuttering you'll see is going to be very dependent on what hardware you have in your gaming PC. Nightreign's system requirements are very light, but there's a devil or two in those details, which we'll look at shortly.

Nightreign also includes Elden Ring's 60 fps cap, with pre-rendered cutscenes coming in at 30 fps. At some point, I have no doubt that modders will knock something up to get around this limit, but for the moment, that's as good as it's going to get.

Due to the frame rate limit, there was little point in doing a normal PC performance analysis (i.e. testing all the quality presets across three resolutions), so for Nightreign, I've simply run the game on a range of PCs and captured how well the game runs. It's not a comprehensive spread of configurations, but it should give you a reasonable idea as to how well Elden Ring Nightreign will run on your gaming PC.

Tested on: Ryzen 7 9800X3D | GeForce RTX 5090 | 32 GB DDR5-6400

4K | Maximum quality

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Let's start with Elden Ring Nightreign at its best. I don't mean that in a graphical sense because the game's visuals are nowhere near as good as Elden Ring's, and subjectively, it's more akin to a game from 10 years ago. When I say 'best' in this case, I mean as glitch-free as possible.

The above capture was taken with Nightreign set to 4K and maximum graphics settings, and you can see that, for the most part, everything is very smooth. Of course, it should be on such a gaming PC, but I have to say that even this rig suffered from frame rate hiccups now and then, especially as one traverses the world and more so when you've got a full complement of teammates with you.

As you can tell from its power consumption, the GeForce RTX 5090 is effectively doing very little, pushing the game's performance almost entirely onto the U and the rest of the system. This means that any minor background issue will be amplified and cause the frame rate to momentarily drop.

Unfortunately, there are no options to replace Nightreign's default anti-aliasing (AA) solution with an upscaler running at 100% or higher, such as AMD's FSR Native AA or Nvidia's DLAA, to give the GPU more to do.

However, I did test out Nvidia's DLDSR (Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution) with the RTX 5090 in a Core Ultra 7 265K rig, with 48 GB of DDR5-8000, and as the above video shows, it does look better. But even with a setting of 2.25x (i.e forcing the internal rendering resolution to 5760 x 3840), the GPU still isn't running anywhere near its full capacity.

Tested on: Core i5 13600K | GeForce RTX 4070 | 32 GB DDR5-6400

1440p | Maximum quality

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It's a similar story when using a lower-tier graphics card that's only two years old, a GeForce RTX 4070. Elden Ring Nightreign has no problem reaching 60 fps with this setup, although 4K is a little too much for the 4070 when using maximum quality settings. It's not the type of graphics routines taking place that's the problem, just the sheer number of pixels.

So while the above video is 4K, the gameplay was captured at 1440p. Once again, the RTX 4070 isn't doing much, which suggests that 4K should be doable, but the GPU just couldn't sustain 60 fps at that resolution.

Also note that, compared to the Core i5 13600K isn't a high-end U, but it's not slow for gaming, either.

Tested on: Ryzen 7 5700X3D | Radeon RX 6750 XT | 32 GB DDR4-3200

1440p | Medium quality

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Now let's take a look at what happens when you use older hardware and, more importantly, an AMD graphics card. The first problem I encountered with this rig is that Elden Ring Nightreign was capped to 30 fps, not 60. There are no options to adjust vsync or anything like that in the game, so I spent a good deal of time messing about in AMD's Adrenalin software to resolve this problem.

The only thing that worked was to force vsync to always be off, but as the video amply demonstrates, you're then just left with some of the worst tearing and timing glitches I've seen in a very long time. At least I could consistently reach 60 fps with the Radeon RX 6750 XT, though only by using 1440p and the Medium quality preset—1440p High is also playable, but the frame rate just isn't as steady as with Medium.

Could you cope playing for hours on end with the game tearing away like that? I know I couldn't, and it's not just the screen tearing. At Medium quality, the level of detail (LOD) transitions are very noticeable, especially if you can see far into the distance as you move along. Vegetation and shadows pop into view very starkly.

I also tested Nightreign using a Radeon RX 7900 XT in this rig, and it also had the same 30 fps problem. Forcing vsync off in Adrenalin once again solved matters, and I could get the full 60 fps at 4K High or 1440p Maximum quality. But I couldn't get rid of the tearing, and I suspect it will require a driver update from AMD to fully resolve it all.

Tested on: Core i7 9700K | Radeon RX 5700 XT | 16 GB DDR4-3200

1080p | High quality

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Interestingly, though, not every AMD GPU I tested had the 30 fps issue. Using the oldest gaming PC I have—a Radeon RX 5700 XT—I was surprised to see that this ancient box ran Nightreign at 1080p High quality with few problems.

Yes, stuttering was present (especially when moving the camera about very quickly), but it was far less of a problem than I expected it to be. However, trying 1440p on Medium or 1080p on Maximum quality tanked the frame rate hard, more than it should do, really. While Nightreign doesn't need upscaling for newer gaming PCs, old rigs like this one would really benefit from being able to use FSR Quality or Balanced to reduce the pixel load.

However, given that FromSoftware's PC port of Elden Ring Nightreign is as bare-bones as possible, it's unlikely that it will be added in a future patch. In fact, there are so few PC-related graphics options that I'm not hopeful of seeing any patches addressing the stuttering and tearing.

Tested on: Asus ROG Ally | 15 W mode

1080p | Low quality

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The last gaming PC I tested Elden Ring Nightreign on was an Asus ROG Ally, with its power limit set to 15 W. The reason why I prefer to use this value, rather than the maximum 30 W, is that you get far more battery life for handheld gaming when the lower power value is used.

Just as with the RX 5700 XT, the 30 fps problem didn't rear its head with this device, though getting the performance anywhere near 60 fps proved impossible. The capture you can see above is at 1080p Low quality, and while the ROG Ally often reaches 40 frames per second or more, the 1% lows are only around 25 fps.

And, truth be told, Nightreign doesn't look very nice using the lowest graphics settings, with barely any AA being applied and shadows glitching across the landscape. Using the Medium preset improves things greatly, but then you have to put up with sub-30 fps performance. It's better when using the Ally's full 30 W mode, but then you're not going to be gaming for very long.

One alternative I explored was Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), a driver-enforced upscaler that works just like FSR 1.0 does. While it allowed me to use the Medium preset and just about hit 30 fps, there was just too much input latency for it to be enjoyable. So, if you are planning on some late-night Nightreign sessions on your handheld gaming PC, you'll need to stick to the Low preset and unpleasant graphics.

If your handheld is a Steam Deck, though, you might want to on Nightreign altogether because if a ROG Ally struggles, the Deck's weaker U and GPU are unlikely to cope at any setting.

Final thoughts

In addition to the above test PCs, I checked out Elden Ring Nightreign on a RTX 3060 Ti.

Generally speaking, none of the GPUs had any problem reaching the frame rate cap, though it does require a little bit of experimenting with resolutions and quality settings. All you really need to do, though, is fire up Nightreign at your preferred resolution and start with the High quality preset—if you need more fps, then just drop it to Medium (avoid Low, if you can).

What I can say with certainty, though, is that if you have an Nvidia GPU, the game will run as glitch-free as it can, but if your gaming rig is home to an AMD GPU, I suspect that it's going to pot luck as to whether you'll experience the same problems that I did.

The newer the hardware, the better everything will be, though that's to be expected, of course. One also expects a FromSoftware PC port to be somewhat problematic, but I have to say that Nightreign is pretty disappointing in of PC options and performance. It's not the frame rate cap I have issues with—any game that runs consistently at 60 fps should be an enjoyable experience, but Nightreign struggles to do this far too frequently.

A 9800X3D and RTX 5090 combination should be permanently 'stuck' at 60 fps in Nightreign, but it often isn't, and there's no obvious reason as to why it's not. It's perhaps understandable when playing online with friends, but offline and solo? That kind of hardware shouldn't be dropping in performance whatsoever.

If Elden Ring Nightreign was toting path-traced, global illumination splendour with every pixel, the performance would be understandable, forgivable even. However, that's absolutely not the case here, and while Nightreign's stuttering is nowhere near as bad as it is in Elden Ring, I am left wondering just why FromSoftware still hasn't solved the issue.

And on the point of graphics, Nightreign's are serviceable, at best. The overall art design isn't bad at all—some of the vistas are genuinely lovely to see—but the anti-aliasing, shadows, and texture quality are disappointing when using anything less than the maximum quality settings. For a 2025 PC game, it's really not good enough.

At least Nightreign runs on old hardware, and it won't take up too much of your PC's storage, with the entire installation requiring just under 21 GB of space. And gameplay beats graphics, every time, so if you don't mind the looks, minimal PC options, and the ever-present penchant for stutters, Nightreign might just tickle your multiplayer Elden Ring bone.