Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree may be the game of the moment, but while the DLC has been very well received, there are still some odd technical issues from the base game, as our own Nick discovered in performance testing.

Patch notes for version 1.12.3 are now available and include several possible causes for the low performance, including a ray tracing setting that is enabled by default and potential conflicts with third-party mouse apps.

"Some PC versions may have ray tracing unintentionally enabled, which can cause erratic performance. Check the raytracing settings on the title screen or in the in-game menu under System > Graphics Settings > Raytracing Quality.

"... Unstable frame rates can be caused by third-party applications that control mouse behavior. Disabling these third-party applications may improve performance."

This is pretty bad news considering that almost every mouse I've used in the past decade has come with some sort of companion app to adjust settings!

[11 This seems like a bit of a shotgun approach to a potential problem, since the note does not give examples of known applications that might cause conflicts.

Still, if you're experiencing lower-than-expected frame rates, it's worth trying disabling the mouse app before launching the game. Besides, you're probably playing Elden Ring with a controller" Other than that, ...... Well, I admire your willpower, let's just say that.

And then there's the ray tracing settings: when I ran Elden Ring on a system with an RX 7800 XT, it defaulted to the High setting with ray tracing disabled, thanks to the auto-detect configuration tool. However, it is worth checking to see if ray tracing is inadvertently enabled on your machine.

You can find that option here:

Other known bugs listed in the notes include "Inappropriate activity detected" that appears without any inappropriate activity (or what is more conventionally called cheats) on the PC message that appears without inappropriate activity on the PC (or more conventionally referred to as cheats), and non-performance related fixes to existing problems.

My favorites include: "Fixed a bug where the unblockable bite attack of the Golden Hippopotamus boss connected with players more easily than intended.

That's a grand statement. Anyway, none of these notes seem to address the elephant in the room (or should I say hippo) of persistent micro-stuttering problems, but at least we can try a few things here that might improve Eldenring performance. Praise the Lord... Wait, wrong game. Wait, wrong game. That's all right.