Shadows malfunction in Elden Ring and similar titles.
Shadows malfunction in Elden Ring and similar titles.
Your graphics are experiencing several problems. Shadows appear distorted—blocky, jagged, and spiky. This tends to occur with smaller objects but can also affect shadows from larger items. Enabling ray-tracing helps reduce this problem. Lighting issues are common, showing graininess more in darker zones. You notice it especially on grass or at the edges of steps, giving the impression of a screen mask. When you move the camera, the pattern follows the object, yet it remains fixed to its position. The graininess becomes more obvious when graphics settings are set to medium and then increased to maximum. Problems started in Elden Ring and have also appeared in Sekiro and Monster Hunter World. Your PC was upgraded with new components at the start of January 2025. Initially, graphics worked well. Early on, I faced booting and stability problems from overclocking Corsair Vengeance RAM on an AMD system. I resolved it by switching to AMD memory on January 18th. The issue continued, so I stopped overclocking. I first noticed the problem around February 14th with lightning effects and graininess the day before. Lighting might have been overlooked since I was in a shaded area. It's possible the Nvidia update a few weeks ago triggered it. I've tried many troubleshooting steps: rebooting, reinstalling drivers, updating BIOS, clearing CMOS, changing RAM, using an older graphics card, connecting to another monitor via HDMI instead of DisplayPort, and even swapping RAM. Despite these attempts, the issue remains.
I also notice some wavering shadows on tiny plants in Elden Ring, particularly in Limgrave when battling the Tree Sentinel. Enabling ray tracing eliminates these rasterized shadows and resolves the problem for me. However, because ray tracing demands a lot of processing power in this game, I usually avoid it. I remember this wasn’t an issue during my first playthrough on a 3080 graphics card, now I’m using a 4080. It seems the main reason is that the engine is aging and having trouble rendering fine shadows on small objects, leading to generally lower shadow quality. This might be related to newer GPUs. Ideally, I’d like Elden Ring to support native DLSS so ray tracing could work smoothly even for users with a 5090 or older system. The modded DLSS works but often appears blurry during movement compared to games using native DLSS. (Yes, I updated the DLSS DLL to DLSS4.) If you’re referring to the flickering torchlight, that’s actually the intended effect.