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Elden Ring remains undefeated: the PS5 Pro can't play it at a stable 60 FPS either

Despite boasting enhanced hardware, the PS5 Pro struggles to deliver a stable 60 FPS experience in Elden Ring, with performance fluctuating in both quality and performance modes, leaving the best console experience to be the PS5 Pro's performance mode while still falling short of a truly smooth gameplay.

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Welp, not even the PS5 Pro can run Elden Ring at a stable 60 frames per second, a recently released tech analysis found.

With its vast open world, dynamic weather, and day-night cycle, Elden Ring is a demanding game even on high-end PCs, but its performance on PS5 in particular has been an issue since launch despite several targeted updates. Digital Foundry has published a new video putting the PS5 Pro's proprietary Game Boost tech to the test and, well, if a locked 60 FPS is the baseline for success, the updated console failed.

Per Eurogamer, running Elden Ring on quality mode, which favors graphical fidelity over frame rate, will occasionally hit 60 FPS, but it'll mostly stay in the 50s, with dips into the 40s during particularly demanding scenes. It's worth noting that the PS5's VRR support at 60Hz doesn't work below 48 FPS, so these dips will be particularly noticeable if you're running VRR.

Naturally, running the game in performance mode, which prioritizes frame rate over visual fidelity, yields better frame rates. And yet, it's still not enough to get Elden Ring running at a locked 60 FPS. DF notes "a weird assortment of dropped frames - sometimes singular, sometimes clustered," but reports a consistent frame rate above that crucial 48 FPS number that keeps VRR enabled, summarizing things by calling performance mode on PS5 Pro the best Elden Ring console experience. It's better, but it ain't smooth as silk. 

Finally, the notoriously demanding ray tracing mode was also tested on PS5 Pro, but DF found it to be a "strange overall" experience, with some parts of the game running "significantly" better than before and others benefitting very minimally from the upgraded hardware.

PS5 Pro is Sony's big mid-cycle refresh, promising 67% more compute cores, 28% faster RAM, and 45% faster rendering, all for the considerable price of $699. If you're trying to decide whether it's worth the investment, I'd point you to our comprehensive PS5 Pro review, which awarded the console 3.5/5 stars and called it "a gorgeous piece of kit for the tech-invested player."

Whether or not it's worth the price, it's undoubtedly the ideal way to play the best PS5 games.