Elden Ring’s poor PS5 performance is due to one silly oversight

For gamers who play Elden Ring on PlayStation 5, it’s often a better experience to play the PS4 version for much better performance. It turns out that Elden Ring’s PS5 performance isn’t just due to the game being more advanced on the next-gen system, but much less optimised.

According to FromSoftware game modder Lance McDonald, the executable that launches the PS5 version of Elden Ring is horrendously unoptimised. Unlike other versions of the game, including the PS4 version, Elden Ring on PS5 lacks simple optimisations.

When looking at FromSoftware’s new Armored Core VI’s PS5 performance, McDonald revealed that they recently reverse engineered the executable for Elden Ring. When doing so, they found out exactly why the game runs so poorly on PlayStation 5 systems.

“I recently reverse engineered Elden Ring’s PS5 executable and the reason their game runs worse in their PS5 builds compared to PS4 is because their PS5 builds have no compiler optimisations whatsoever,” McDonald said. “It’s that simple.”

As it turns out, Armored Core VI has the exact same issue on PlayStation 5. While the game is locked to 30fps 1800p on PS4 Pro, putting that version of the game into a PS5 gives you a solid 60fps instead. However, you will miss out on the ray-tracing feature, even if it’s not that great.

In his experience, McDonald believes that most people should play Armored Core VI’s PS4 version on PS5 instead of the console’s native port. If a solid framerate is most important to you, it’s clearly the way to go.

If you want more Armored Core VI content, you should check out our guides on the new FromSoftware game. Are you struggling to beat the game’s first boss, Helicopter? Maybe you’re getting crushed by Balteus. After all, it’s a FromSoft game, so it’s quite hard.

FromSoftware isn’t done with Elden Ring yet, although the game has been out for a while. At the time of writing, a massive Elden Ring expansion is still in the works, and a sequel is likely in its early stages as well.