The new Elden Ring patch (version 1.09) surprisingly added the long-awaited ray tracing features on both PC and current-generation consoles.

　　On consoles, users will find the ray tracing setting under the Game Options menu, while PC users will see ray tracing quality under Graphics. Unfortunately, early reports point to a less than ideal implementation.

　　The ray traced effects (only enabled for ambient occlusion and shadows) added to Elden Ring are rather subtle, as you can see in the below example shared by ResetEra user disgraciau.

　　RT OFF

　　RT ONOn the other hand, the performance hit is reportedly severe, and FromSoftware did not add support for any upscaler (NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS) to the game's PC version yet. Luckily, modder PureDark is working on such a mod, which may well prove vital to run the game with ray tracing enabled.

　　We'll test out the Elden Ring RT update ourselves shortly and report our findings. Meanwhile, here are the main balancing changes made by FromSoftware to the game; the full changelog from patch 1.09 is available here.

　　Added an invincibility window when respawning in the colosseum.Increased the scaling of the following attributes when infusing weapons with certain Ashes of War:Magic / Fire / Flame Art / Lightning / SacredIncreased the attribute scaling of the following weapon types:Colossal Sword / Great Axe / Hammer / Flail / Great Hammer / Colossal WeaponIncreased the speed, range and recovery time of some attacks for the following weapon types:Great Hammer / Great Axe / Great Sword / Curved GreatswordFlail weapons changes:Increased the speed of some attacks.Reduced attack recovery time.Increased poise when using two-handed attacks.Increased running attacks speed and reduced attack recovery time for the following weapon types:Straight Sword / Curved Sword / Katana / Twinblade Sword / Axe / Hammer / HalberdIncreased the first attack speed for the following weapon types:Straight Sword / Curved Sword / WhipIncreased the speed of guard counters for the following weapon types:Straight Sword / Great Sword / Colossal Sword / Great Curved Sword / Katana / Twinblade Sword / Axe / Great Axe / Flail / Great Hammer / Spear / Great Spear / HalberdReduced the attack recovery time for Whip weapons.Increased the damage of Claw weapons.Added Holy damage and Faith scaling to the Great Club.Increased damage negation when blocking Holy damage and decreased damage negation when blocking damage from other affinities.Increased the effectiveness of the Twinblade Talisman.Slightly reduced rolling travel distance for light equipment weights.Decreased the hitbox size for some attacks of the following weapon types:Thrusting Sword / Heavy thrusting Sword / Spear / Great Spear / HalberdIn other news, the award-winning games just added another GOTY prize from the GDC Awards 2023.