Real-time ray-traced graphics were a big buzz around the time that Elden Ring Items was announced. Close to the release, Bandai-Namco, the game's publisher, also announced that the developer FromSoftware could well be releasing a patch due to its magnum opus that includes ray-traced effects. Well, that patch will be here.
The relief of the update would be a bit of a surprise; many buy elden ring items players believe that if the promised patch ever came, it could be with the game's upcoming Shadow from the Erdtree DLC. It's possible that the DLC was crafted with one of these visual effects planned, which FromSoftware wished to get it out now to settle any troubles before punting while using expansion.
Official details about the update are fairly meager, but from the investigation, the ray-traced effects available seem to be on a ray-traced ambient occlusion and several ray-traced shadows, especially those originating from sunlight. While it really is a little disappointing—we might have liked to possess seen full ray-traced global illumination, as with Cyberpunk 2077's "Psycho" mode, maybe in Dying Light 2—the effects being offered are still a visible upgrade on the original game's look.
The pictures in the following paragraphs are cropped beyond full-size screenshots; it is possible to click the crooks to see the full pictures, but they'll always be resized. If you want to view the original 4K screenshots, you'll be able to hit this hyperlink to the author's Google Drive. Looking at the images by doing an A-B comparison, toggling between -on and -off images, it gets extremely evident the spot that the ray-traced improvements are.
Obviously, one of the most noticeable effects for most places would be the ray-traced ambient occlusion. Replacing the easy (and decidedly last-gen) screen space effect the game had before, the ray-traced ambient occlusion is both more accurate plus more intense, with dark shadows appearing in corners and near ledges high were none before. Shadows appear under small objects like books and fungal caps, plus it really enriches the detail and realism of most scenes pretty significantly.
Meanwhile, the ray-traced shadows are primarily (or even exclusively) cast by sunlight. They're softer plus more accurate compared to the game's original shadow maps, which may look a bit unrealistically precise at times the location where the new shadows acquire more of a fuzzy look. They're also additionally common versus the game's original shadows, being placed on more objects inside the scene. Like with all the RTAO, it's actually a subtle but significant improvement.
What's the purchase price? Well, far more RAM and VRAM usage, you can tell that. Also a significant chunk of performance, in case you are using a lower-end card, or maybe a previous-generation AMD GPU. We haven't done detailed performance testing, additionally, on your author's personal machine—with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and also a GeForce RTX 4080—there was no notable effect on performance by any means, even playing in 4K, most folks aren't rocking an RTX 4080 card.
Normally within a ray-traced game, you could potentially seek to counterbalance the cost with realistic visuals while on an intelligent upscale, like DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. None of the are present with this game and combined using the specific number of effects that FromSoftware implemented, we suspect this patch was primarily created with all the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X at heart. You can (along with perhaps should) run FSR 2 on those consoles, however, it's not available here—at least, not even, anyway.