Elden Ring performance on a PS4

 

The status of Elden Ring is almost legendary in the video game industry, game media and fans of Soulsborne genre. Fromsoftware’s latest offering made waves when first revealed in a small teaser on E3 2019, three years ago, with the information of legendary Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer, G.R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame involved in penning down the lore of the game.

However, after that short teaser leaving ardent fans to mull on the possible lore for months and speculate over the future of game’s mechanics and world design, the game went into a complete shell of secrecy impenetrable by attempts of even the most potent of news-breakers.

After that it was an agonizing wait for official news. Information would surface every now and then creating stupendous fervour and uproar in the community and then would get called out as a false rumour. Thus this would continue for months leaving many fans fearing the game entering development hell. Considering the fact that legendary auteur of the series, Hidetaki Miyazaki was himself involved in the title and Xbox Head, Phill Spencer had declared it as the auteur’s most ambitious and (in Miyazaki’s own words) largest project to date, the basis of such fears was rightly justified considering how many considered FromSoft now chasing after the shadow of its success with Sekiro, winner of Game of the Year 2019 at the Oscar’s of video game industry, “The Game Awards”, in a tight competition.

However, finally the world truly got a good look at the game with a trailer and gameplay recently and all fears were quashed with a release date of February 25, 2022. 

To be honest, after watching that trailer and the gameplay, it is clear that Fromsoftware is clearly looking ahead in evolving the genre they brought to fame in every way possible. My initial impressions of the game left my mind spinning in a burst of ecstacy & my mouth agape. It is one of the most stunning and exciting offerings that I can already see becoming a clear record smashing hit on release.

Elden Ring shares most of its DNA with Dark Souls with many similar textures, UI design and basic mechanics. It feels like Skyrim in scale but with the aesthetics and game design ideology of Fromsoftware. Elden Ring truly appears like a next generation offering with its vast open world ambition and mouth-watering painterly visual aesthetic. 

Yet that is where new fears began considering the fact that it was not only releasing for new generation but rather the last generation as well. Looking at the recent debacle with some of the high profile titles like Cyberpunk and Fromsoftware’s own history of their title’s performance on past generation consoles, it was justified to think, keeping in view the ambition and scale on offer, that the game engine would simply buckle on the most omnipresent hardware in most people’s possessions. I was reminded of the experience with PS3 and 360-era with the games’s frame-rates falling sub 20fps in various areas and loading taking excruciating time. Even on last generation hardware, it is hard to forget the issues plaguing FromSoft's game performances with long loading times on Bloodborne and erratic performance of frame-rate in apparently least taxing areas of Dark Souls 3.

Thus reflecting on all of this, it was safe to clearly not recommend and spoil the experience by buying those last generation versions until a clear verdict emerged over the quality of their performance, a factor most important in an action RPG taking intense test of visual reflexes.

Well the famous Modder and Youtuber, Lance McDonald, has finally made a sacrifice to reassure the fans by giving a detailed analysis of the performance over these old generation hardware by taking the recently offered Network Test of the game by FromSoftware on the old PS4 with the worst possible conditions to hinder the quality of the game possible.

What Lance has done, is take one of the first edition base PS4 and installed one of the slowest running stock HDDs (5400rpm) in it and then ran the network test from it, recording and analysing hours of footage and testing out various taxing situations to make mince-meat out of the old & infamously weak CPUs of these old gen machines.

How was the experience?

In Lance’s own words, “Throughout my time playing, there was never a moment where I felt that I would have been better able to react to or cope with the challenge if I had been playing on a more powerful system. There is an absolutely solidly enjoyable experience to be had by anyone for whom the Play Station 4 is currently the most powerful console they currently own.”

How has been this possible? 

Well, the easy answer is smart game design and incredible levels of optimization that you normally would expect the developers to not give these old generation machines. However a more detailed perspective has been detailed in Lance’s YouTube video which we will summarize below.

Visuals and Scale of the world:

From the opening moment into the vast world of 'Limgrave', even on the old hardware, the incredible seamless distance expanding to vast horizons is nothing short of impressive especially considering the scale and density of the environment. Fromsoft’s smart game rendering choices since the days of Dark Souls has come to play again to allow a seamless presentation without taxing the performance or any need for limiting the quality of the display with fog or other elements such as reduced LOD or draw distance. The way It does it is by using a middleware to allow a snapshot of the distance to present on the screen making it possible to manage the closer load and detail without compromising on quality of performance.

The resolution like previous offerings on the base consoles is full 1080p once again alleviating worries of the game having a very low resolution to simply run on these old machines. The textures too appear quite adequately detailed. Even if they are not as sharp as the newer generation of PC offerings, at least they are not a muddy soup making the game look like something from PS2 era. They very clearly appear to be something you would expect from a proper last generation game.

Overall, as you traverse the expanse, for great distances you can see enemies and npcs with various amounts of hostility going about the vast expanse doing what they want to do and similarly trees and foliage stretch out to similar lengths without any significant compromise on the quality of visuals.

 

Loading and Streaming:

In FromSoft games, you die and you die a lot. After this you are usually sent back to a near resting place from where you have to traverse back to the place of death to retry the encounter. Loading times in such cases have often been a point of contention specially considering how initial Bloodborne release could have taken anywhere from 40s to a minute to revive you back on the resting point. Worry not however, for even if they are not instantaneous like the modern gen hardware, at least they are not atrocious like most of the offerings on last gen when it comes to loading. As a matter of fact, you can even call it extremely fast considering the usual pedigree of load times on these consoles. After a boss encounter, it at most takes a meagre 15s on the slowest hard-drive to return to a resting point. Out in the field, loading times can take around 22s which is again nothing compared to other games from the same developers and in general.

As for asset streaming, it goes without a hitch even on the slowest hard-drive on high speed traversal, alleviating any worries of world hitching or significant pop in.

 

Framerate/Performance:

As from Lance’s gameplay, its clearly visible how fluid the combat encounters in any area of the game are as well as the world streaming. It’s even more impressive when you analyse all that on the frame-rate graph. For an open world game this vast and with such an incredible level of detail and CPU load involved, one would expect the frame-rate to constantly buckle under its set goal. However, it is an extremely stable 30fps with minor instantaneous dips to under-30 in screen exploding effects. Even during combat with many effects evolved, the game would go down and recover for small instances to around to roughly 27-28fps.

The only glaring issue that persists is the bad frame-pacing which should not essentially be a problem for those who have already played past titles on these consoles and been fine with it.

Furthermore, I do wonder if FromSoft could have given a lower resolution 720p performance mode, could we have achieved a higher framerate as we have seen possible from Lance's famous experimentation and modding of Bloodborne to do just that where the game now runs on a nearly seamless 60fps on the Pro PS4 models. I really do believe that various modes should also be an offering on previous gen hardwares, not only for base console players but for those looking to benefit on Pro models or backwards compatibility. 

 

All in All, it is now clear that FromSoftware’s new offering is not only ambitious in its scale but on a technical level even on old generation hardware where it can even be considered a marvelous feat of engineering. Indeed, I cannot wait, to now pick up this game for my base PS4 without fear of suffering from any bad performance and having a bad time. I think for an overwhelming audience with only PS4 in their possession, Lance McDonald’s research is only a good omen for the coming year.

Update on 19/12/2021, 10:09 PST: Digital Foundry have uploaded their in-depth analysis of the state of last gen console performance in depth too and they mostly affirm to lance McDonald's findings with further detail and comparisons with the Xbox One versions.