Elden Ring Tarnished Edition GDC 2026 Previews Indicate Improved Nintendo Switch 2 Performance

While FromSoftware had pushed back the Nintendo Switch 2 release of Elden Ring Tarnished Edition to focus on improving its performance, new previews of the port have been popping up thanks to GDC 2026, with outlets like GameSpot and Polygon noting that it runs much better now.

The demo, offering 15 minutes of gameplay, revolved around the early parts of Elden Ring. Polygon noted that it was enough time to at least get to Margit. However, according to GameSpot’s video preview (which you can check out below), direct capture wasn’t available, leading to footage being captured with an over-the-shoulder camera.

Most importantly, however, the previews noted that, while still not quite as smooth as 60 FPS, the frame rate for Elden Ring Tarnished Edition in handheld mode is quite a bit better than the previously-reported dips down to 15 FPS. While FromSoftware itself is yet to reveal any details about its performance targets, the smoother frame rates in its more recent builds might indicate that the company is aiming for 30 FPS, or maybe even 40 FPS.

Elden Ring Tarnished Edition was announced all the way back in April 2025. While few details were released at the time, the name indicated that FromSoftware was looking at the release as a “definitive edition” of sorts.

However, a few months later, reports started coming up that performance of Elden Ring Tarnished Edition was quite poor, especially in handheld mode. In one video from August 2025, Nintendo Life’s Felix Sanchez noted that the game was capped to 30 FPS, but intense moments had the tendency to bring it down to 20, and sometimes even 15 FPS. He compared it to playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, which famously ran at low frame rates.

“It’s really bad, and I understand why they don’t want you to see this,” said Sanchez in the video. “It was like playing Ocarina of Time. 20 frames-per-second, sometimes it was like 15 frames-per-second.”

While the previous console releases of Elden Ring had been praised for running quite well, the PC version was well-known for suffering from micro-stutters. The problem was discovered to largely revolve around how the game handles compilation. Linux-based platforms, like the lower-powered Steam Deck, saw a notable performance boost in Elden Ring thanks to the fact that shaders are compiled on the operating system before the game even launches, thanks to how the Proton translation layer works between the game and Linux’s graphics APIs.

Leading up to its originally-planned October 2025 release, FormSoftware announced that Elden Ring Tarnished Edition was being pushed back to 2026 so that the studio could work on “performance adjustments”. The company hasn’t yet revealed any new release date.

Originally released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S back in 2022, Elden Ring is FromSoftware’s latest single-player Soulslike. It puts players in the shoes of a Tarnished, who has been cursed with living despite already having died, and revolves around exploring The Lands Between. Along the way, players will discover what happened to what used to be a great kingdom, and will get to meet (and fight) many of the key figures throughout this world’s history. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion dug further into the backstory of the world, giving us hints about some of the less-explored aspects of the lore, like the nature of Frenzy, and the backstory of Marika.

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