Modder turns on Elden Ring ray tracing early, but it's "completely broken for now"

A prolific Soulsbourne modder and dataminer has gotten Elden Ring's ray tracing option enabled early, though the feature is "completely broken for now", naturally.

FromSoftware confirmed earlier this year that Elden Ring was getting ray tracing. This week, following the 1.07 patch, modder Lance McDonald uncovered menu strings relating to the feature in the game files, seemingly a hint that the graphical update would be landing soon. It turns out that ray tracing can be enabled in Elden Ring right now, but it will not give you the results you might want.

"I was able to enable ray tracing in the latest Elden Ring update with a small patch to the executable," McDonald says in a tweet. "However it seems to be completely broken for now, I assume some shaders missing or something."

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As you can see in the images McDonald provided, the game seems to just remove its lighting when the ray tracing option is enabled through the mod, turning everything into a black silhouette. Distant objects are still rendered normally. Curiously, things that are already reflective, like water surfaces, still use Elden Ring's default screen space reflections.

While this isn't the proper ray tracing update, it does hint at potential limitations for that update, suggesting that Elden Ring's actual ray tracing will focus on foreground objects and won't be replacing screen space reflections. But, of course, that's subject to change before FromSoftware officially implements ray tracing.

Datamines for recent patches have also seemed to be pointing the way toward Elden Ring DLC, and possibly even plans for multiple expansions.