I, a seasoned Tarnished who has braved the Lands Between more times than I can count, was convinced 2026 would be my year. The PS5 Pro was finally in my hands, a gleaming monument to technological progress promising to smooth out the very fabric of reality in my favorite games. I booted up Elden Ring, ready for my pilgrimage to the Erdtree to be as silky as Morgott's golden lies. Imagine my soul-crushing despair when I discovered that, even with this beast of a machine, achieving a stable 60 frames per second in FromSoftware's masterpiece remained as elusive as a peaceful interaction with Patches. The dream was dead on arrival, shattered like a fragile pot after a careless roll.

Let me break down this tragicomic symphony of digital disappointment. According to the tech oracles at Digital Foundry, whose analysis I now view with the solemn respect one gives a prophet of doom, Elden Ring on PS5 Pro offers three paths to graphical glory, each more fraught with peril than the last. We have the Quality mode, the Performance mode, and the Ray-Tracing (RT) mode. Choosing between them feels less like optimizing settings and more like picking which type of Scarlet Rot you'd prefer to contract.

The Grand Illusion: Quality Mode

This mode promises native 4K, the pinnacle of clarity! With the PS5 Pro's boosted horsepower, I expected a buttery journey. The reality? This mode runs about as consistently as my resolve when facing Maliketh for the tenth time. A lot of the quieter, open-field sections do touch 60fps, granting fleeting moments of bliss. But for the grand, chaotic battles the game is famous for? It's a slideshow in the making. The frame rate primarily hovers around a jittery 50fps, with frequent, heart-stopping dips into the 40s. This is catastrophic because the console's VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support, which is supposed to smooth these things out, taps out at 48fps. Dropping below that is like watching a majestic dragon's flight turn into a series of clumsy, teleporting jump-cuts. The experience is as jarring as hearing "you died" after what you swore was a perfect dodge.

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The Least-Worst Option: Performance Mode

Desperate for salvation, I switched to Performance mode. This mode uses dynamic resolution scaling, trading some pixel density for the holy grail of 60fps. On the Pro, it's... better. It's the option Digital Foundry begrudgingly recommends. But here's the kicker: it's still not perfect. The analysis found a "weird assortment of dropped frames" preventing a solid lock. It's like your framerate is a frenzied Tarnished desperately rolling away from attacks—it mostly succeeds, but you're always one misstep away from disaster. The saving grace is that it generally doesn't plummet below that critical 48fps VRR threshold, so the stutters are less soul-crushing. It's the digital equivalent of using a cracked tear in your Flask of Wondrous Physick; it helps, but you know you're not operating at full, intended strength.

The Forbidden Fruit: Ray-Tracing Mode

If Quality mode is unstable, and Performance mode is compromised, then Ray-Tracing mode is the frenzy flame ending of graphical options—it promises beautiful, improved lighting effects but burns your performance to a crisp. This mode reduces the resolution to 1620p to make room for those fancy reflections and shadows. Digital Foundry called it "a mess" on the base PS5, and the Pro's extra muscle does little to clean it up. Enabling RT is like deciding to fight Starscourge Radahn while wearing full Lionel's set and fat-rolling; the view might be marginally more impressive for a second, but you're just asking to be flattened. The frame rate becomes more unpredictable than the attacks of a Runebear, making precise combat feel like trying to perform surgery during an earthquake.

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So, what's the deal? Why is my shiny new PS5 Pro struggling with a game from 2022? The bitter truth is that FromSoftware has not released a dedicated PS5 Pro patch for Elden Ring. All this testing is done using the console's backward-compatible "Game Boost" feature, which tries to wring out extra performance from unpatched games. It's a blunt instrument, not a precision tool. The Pro is trying to brute-force its way to stability, and Elden Ring's famously intricate, dense world is resisting like a boss with a massive health bar.

There is a sliver of hope, a Grace Site in this barren landscape of frame drops. FromSoftware did release a PS4 Pro patch for Dark Souls 3 back in the day, which significantly improved performance. They could absolutely do the same for Elden Ring on PS5 Pro. A proper patch could optimize the game for the new hardware's unique architecture, potentially unlocking that coveted, rock-solid 60fps across all modes. But as of 2026, that patch is as mythical as the unreleased DLC everyone's still whispering about. We are left waiting, our performance as up in the air as a player being launched into the stratosphere by a Giant's flame.

For now, my journey continues in Performance mode. The PS5 Pro isn't the magic bullet I dreamed of. The leap in quality for Elden Ring is less a majestic sprint and more a cautious, stutter-stepped limp. I'll keep my fingers crossed for that patch, but until then, I guess a Tarnished's struggle was never meant to be smooth.