Elden Ring Receives Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion and Shadows in New Update

FromSoftware has released update 1.09 for Elden Ring, adding the long-rumored ray tracing support. It’s available on PS5 and PC, with modder Lance Macdonald confirming support for ray-traced ambient occlusion and ray-traced shadows. Unfortunately, there are no ray-traced reflections or Nvidia DLSS support (which would improve performance).

Macdonald also reports no improvements to indoor shadows, with vegetation receiving shadows in the open world. While ray-traced ambient occlusion removes the glow from cliffs and rock edges up close, distant areas remain the same. Though he felt it offered a “minimal difference”, performance reportedly took “a severe hit” on a GeForce 2070 Super. How it performs on PS5 remains to be seen.

Stay tuned for more updates. Elden Ring is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC. An expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, is in development and rumored to launch after Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon (reportedly planned for September/October).

The #ELDENRING servers will undergo maintenance today, March 23, 2022 to deploy patch 1.09.
This update contains balance adjustments and bug fixes.

Maintenance will begin at 0:00 PDT | 08:00 CET | 16:00 JST and last 3 hours on all platforms.

Thank you for your patience.

— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) March 23, 2023

Elden Ring 1.09 is now live on PS5 and PC. It adds support for ray traced ambient occlusion and raytraced shadows. No ray traced reflections. No support for DLSS to help with performance.

PS5 update is 5gb, PC is 200mb. PS5 is bigger due to precompiled shaders being included. https://t.co/4oIMOcWgq8 pic.twitter.com/0fM7mV0qBM

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) March 23, 2023

Sadly, indoor shadows see basically no improvement. It mostly adds vegetation shadows in the overworld. Performance takes a severe hit on my geforce 2070super, no idea how it runs on PS5 yet. Haven't had a chance to look.

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) March 23, 2023

First image: ray tracing off. Second image: ray tracing on. Third image demonstrates how RTAO eliminates the glow around the cliff/rock edge in close areas (but not far ones). Basically, it's a very minimal difference. pic.twitter.com/cZ7tE1YJYd

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) March 23, 2023