This is mainly for those who have played, are playing, or will play Elden Ring and may struggle with some of its shortcomings, such as low FPS—especially in the DLC—despite having a decent computer capable of running the game.
Since around December, I had been playing the base game until I reached the DLC without experiencing any FPS issues or motion sickness. However, once I got past Mohg, Lord of Blood, and entered the Land of Shadow, I started experiencing really bad frame rates and significant motion sickness without being able to figure out why.
I spent several days trying to diagnose the issue—changing settings on my computer, updating my GPU driver, turning off processes in Task Manager, and doing extensive online research to figure out what the problem was. Finally, after a long time, I had to accept the answer I kept finding online: the DLC was simply poorly optimized.
To give you an idea of just how bad the issue was—despite getting around 80 FPS in the main game (confirmed using the Unlock the Framerate mod from Nexus Mods) in almost all areas—I was consistently getting only 40-50 FPS in the DLC, with very few exceptions. How do I know my computer isn’t the issue? Because in a normally optimized game, adjusting the graphical settings should impact FPS. Setting everything to "MAXIMUM" should result in lower FPS compared to "LOW" or "VERY LOW." However, I saw no FPS changes regardless of settings, with my GPU constantly sitting at 20% utilization and the FPS locked at 40-50, no matter where I looked.
The performance drop was significant and led to motion sickness, which was further exacerbated by another issue that began bothering me a lot: Chromatic Aberration.
If you're unfamiliar with it, here’s a definition I found online:
"Chromatic aberration, also known as color fringing, is a color distortion that creates an outline of unwanted color along the edges of objects in a photograph."
And here is a zoomed-in (and perhaps exaggerated) image from Elden Ring that illustrates exactly what I’m talking about:
image from this subreddit
For most players, this might not be an issue, especially since it is scaled down to a point where it's barely noticeable. However, those with more sensitive eyes—like me—can still be bothered by such effects, even when they are subtle.
All of these issues combined resulted in frustrating migraines and massive eye strain, to the point where I had to lie down for an hour after playing just to recover.
I even got new glasses, hoping that perhaps my vision was the problem. While that helped, it didn’t completely fix the issue. What did? Modders.
After extensive research, I found two things: a video by a creator named Gopher, who explains exactly how to disable Chromatic Aberration, including the necessary steps: disabling Anti-Cheat (which prevents online play), unlocking FPS, and—most importantly— a mod called FSR Frame Generation and Temporal Super Resolution (ERSS-FG), created by huutaiii.
In short, this mod forces the game to generate extra frames—whether they are "fake" or not—without any noticeable (at least for me) changes to graphics. Using this mod boosted my FPS in the DLC from 40-50 to 80-90 almost instantly. That, combined with disabling Chromatic Aberration, finally made the DLC playable for me!
I won’t even pretend to understand exactly how the mod works. All I know is that my GPU utilization jumped from 20% to 70-75%, and along with that, my FPS significantly increased.
Now I can finally play the DLC and finish it without any headaches!
I wanted to make this post in case anyone else is struggling with similar issues. Your computer may meet the required specifications to run the game, but even so, you might still encounter technical problems—like I did—that aren’t your fault or your computer’s fault.
