With this article, we might as well start an advice column called How to Get Elden Ring to Run Like a Modern PC Game, Instead of a Console Exclusive from 2014. This time around, we’re focusing on two aspects that many gamers consider paramount to the PC-gaming experience: getting the game to run at an ultrawide 21:9 or 32:9 aspect ratio on a modern gaming monitor, and uncapping the frame rate for all Tarnished who want to play at refresh rates higher than 60Hz.
If you didn’t see frame-rate improvements by unlocking your shader cache (a tip from our last article on Elden Ring’s shaky initial performance on PCs), or want to see more of the game than what’s available in 16:9, read on and learn how the Flawless Widescreen game-modification utility can broaden your horizons beyond the limitations that FromSoftware, Elden Ring’s developer, put on the game.
Ultrawide Monitor Owner? Flawless Widescreen Is Your Friend
Whether you’ve been using an ultrawide monitor (like I have) for some time, or are just getting started with one, the app Flawless Widescreen should be on your PC’s desktop, whether you have a 21:9 or 32:9 panel. It can also be handy here even if you’re “stuck” using a 16:9 gaming panel, as long as that screen features a higher-than-60Hz refresh rate.
However wide your ultrawide desktop may be, this app forces many of the most popular console ports and older titles to adjust the in-game aspect ratio automatically to a 21:9 or 32:9 layout. It does that either via stretching a 16:9 source image or unlocking the capability that was seemingly latent in the engine, waiting to be unearthed.
The latter case is what we’ve seen in Elden Ring. Confoundingly, the developers at FromSoftware locked the game to a 16:9 aspect ratio, despite the fact that gamers with (today’s increasingly common) ultrawide monitors would already, temptingly, see their Elden Ring load screens rendered in a full 21:9 aspect ratio. So the game gives you tips and map previews in glorious widescreen, but then reduces that aspect ratio once it actually comes time to play the game. What a tease!
Many PC gamers, like myself, were also frustrated to find that Elden Ring was confined to a 60-frame-per-second (fps) cap. A 60fps frame rate may be satisfactory for the game-console crowd; consoles only recently started supporting games at 100fps and above. But PC players who may be used to games like Valorant that can reliably hit 300fps-plus aren’t so easily impressed at 60Hz. Enter, Flawless Widescreen.
A Caution: Should I Exceed the Elden Ring FPS Cap?
Once you’ve downloaded Flawless Widescreen and installed it on your Windows PC, the next step is to properly configure Elden Ring to work with the software.
First up, though, a consideration about how you want to play Elden Ring. For the time being, any mods to the Elden Ring engine may be considered a “hack” by FromSoftware’s Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software. If Flawless Widescreen is detected, your account could be flagged as cheating, in which case your username would be banned from playing online. The game would still work fine in single-player mode, but you would need to send an appeal to FromSoftware to get online access reenabled.
If online play is important to you, FromSoftware wants everyone to abide by the same 60fps cap, and it considers an increase in that frame rate a competitive advantage.
If you’re like me, however, and don’t care about PvP or co-op online play, then this fix is the one for you. While I was regularly struggling against bosses and enemies with the screen at 16:9 and the 60fps limit enforced, my success rates skyrocketed once I shifted to 21:9 and removed the frame-rate cap. I was able to hit an average of 120fps to 160fps, depending on the area in the game. Enemy attacks were much easier to read when telegraphed, and my dodge-timing precision went up, too.
This is down to the basic math of monitor refresh rates. The sooner you’re able to see a pixel refresh on your screen, the more quickly you’ll be able to react to what happens. It’s the reason high-refresh monitors exist in the first place, and although we start to see diminishing returns the higher up in refresh rate we go, there’s no denying that a player at 60Hz and a player at 165Hz are going to have two very different experiences in a title as reliant on action timing as Elden Ring is.
How to Configure Flawless Widescreen for Elden Ring
With those warnings out of the way, it’s time to get to work on configuring your game to work with Flawless Widescreen. After you have run the Flawless Widescreen installer, start by opening up the program, and scrolling down the left-hand menu until you find Elden Ring listed. Click on it…
From here, you’ll be presented with the following menu of options…
First, check the box for Fix Enabled…
From here, the configuration options you choose will be entirely dependent on your personal monitor and preferences. I, for example, chose the Aspect Fix option, which will automatically apply either a 21:9 or 32:9 fill to your game to get rid of the black bars on either side…
That’s tip-fix No. 1, and will only apply to you, of course, if you have a widescreen monitor that can take advantage of it.
How to Remove the Frame Rate Cap in Elden Ring
Next, tip No. 2. I also applied the Remove 60Hz FS Limit option, and since I play on a 200Hz monitor, I set the Frametime Adjustment slider to 200fps…
These settings account for the frame-rate adjustment in FromSoftware’s engine, ensuring that all elements of the experience are “in sync” with each other, in a nutshell. This slider should always match the peak refresh rate of your monitor, if you’ve chosen to increase the frame rate beyond 60Hz.
Those are my personal adjustments, but Flawless Widescreen also offers the opportunity to change your in-game field of vision, or FOV. That’s tip No. 3. Making the FOV wider could give you an advantage against hard-to-track bosses who’d otherwise disappear offscreen.
In a related way, you can also just mess here with the in-game vignette filter slider. This slider adjusts how noticeable the game’s filmic post-processing elements appear on screen. This is less a pure-performance or competitive-advantage tweak than an eye-candy one.
Next, and this is critical: Before you launch, create an empty text file using Notepad. Enter the numbers 1245620, and save the file as steam_appid.txt wherever your Elden Ring EXE file has been installed by Steam. This will prevent EAC (the anti-cheat feature) from booting in front of the Elden Ring EXE, and keep your account safe.
Last up, set your Steam application to Offline Mode using the menu in the top-left corner, and launch the game from your library as normal.
If you ever want to re-enter multiplayer mode, simply exit the game, go into Flawless Widescreen, and re-click the Fix Enabled box. All the adjustments will be undone. Exit Flawless Widescreen, re-login to Steam, and fight your friends/enemies at will.
Seizing Elden Ring, In All Its Glory
For anyone still worried about their online-play prospects in the future, there’s hope yet. Apparently, FromSoftware has been friendly to the modding community on past Souls games, so there’s no reason to suspect that using Flawless Widescreen will remain on the list of bannable offenses for long.
Also, according to the developers at Flawless Widescreen, very little of its mod actually needed to mess with the game files. Upon digging, they found that all of the features listed here (the uncapped frame-rate function, the ultrawide ratio support up to 32:9, and the FOV slider) were all natively built into the PC version of the game, but were for some reason intentionally restricted on release. All the mod developers had to do was unlock what was already there.
It’s an assumption on my part right now, but I’d have to guess it’s down to the PvP elements. From the beginning, Souls games have been about pinpoint, precision timing, whether you’re facing down the Nameless King or just another nameless real player in a duel. By giving PC players the advantage of faster frame rates and increased FOVs solely because they own better hardware—having a 60Hz monitor versus a 390Hz monitor, for example—the balance shifts too far in their favor.
Restricting this is understandable. But with this mod, we gain the perfect point of compromise: Keep the uncapped aspect ratios and frame-rate options in the single-player game, and re-cap them upon entry to a PvP match to even the playing field.
Until something in that vein is officially added to the game by FromSoftware, though, the mod community will never stop serving the public need. Flawless Widescreen is the perfect option for anyone who wants to get the full, jaw-droppingly beautiful experience that Elden Ring has to offer single-player gamers, and it’s just as easy to disable it if you ever feel the need to drop back into PvP. Onward, weary Tarnished, to wider horizons!
