Valve Fixed Elden Ring Stuttering Just For The Steam Deck
Although I think I’m one of the lucky ones,
My performance so far has been pretty good, there are a lot of people who have problems with the game ancient ring on PC. Among them, there are no those who play on Valve’s Stream Deck. Stuttering was huge a problem for PC players since the launch of the game, even after the update, and many have suspected that this is due to the way the game compiles shaders, or, in this case, that it does not do it very well (not that ancient ring here’s one, google “compile shaders for pc” and you’ll find tons of games suffering from performance spikes and instances of stuttering).
This doesn’t happen on consoles, because with fixed hardware (for example, all consoles are exactly the same and don’t have the endless variations of components present on PC), this can be done ahead of time, and not every time you start the game is played, as is often the case with a computer game. Steam Deck, while being a PC, is also a piece of fixed hardware, so could enjoy the same benefits if Valve can implement them.
What do they have in this case? Here’s Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffe demonstrating last month’s improvements to the Steam Deck version in an optimization preview build. a fix that is now available for all users:
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Save Hyrule and check the time
Play three full Legend of Zelda games on this retro-styled Game & Watch The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Like Griffe tells Eurogamer,
On Linux/Proton, we have a pretty extensive shader pre-cache system with multiple layers of source and binary cache representations pre-configured and shared by users. On deck, we’re taking this to the next level as we have a unique GPU and driver combination and most of the shaders you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure. When the game tries to compile the shader through the selected graphics API, they are usually skipped as we find the precompiled cache entry on disk.
However, it turned out that shader compilation was not the main problem here, as originally assumed. Instead, Graffe says it was actually before:
Stuttering caused by the shader pipeline is not the biggest issue we’ve seen with this game. The recent example we’ve highlighted has more to do with a game creating many thousands of resources, such as command buffers, in certain places, causing our memory manager to overwork trying to handle it. We now cache these allocations more aggressively, which seems to help a lot.
Who would have thought that one of the biggest surprises of this portable PC a strong point would be that it was basically built as a console.
