Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is here, but I won’t be starting it on PC without these two apps at the ready.
I’m ready to rip through Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion on PC, but that experience goes beyond just a code to add to my Steam library. Over the past two years, I’ve run through Elden Ring about four times — once on my own and three more times with friends with the Seamless Co-op mod. And throughout my journeys in the Lands Between, I’ve learned of two critical apps that vastly improve the experience on PC.
One is a free app and the other is a paid app, which I recommend using in tandem. They both aim to improve the smoothness of Elden Ring and add features that aren’t available in the PC port.The freebie
Let’s start with the freebie. The app in question is Special K, which is described as the “Swiss Army Knife” of PC mods. It’s a powerhouse utility that can do just about anything. It can force Nvidia Reflex in games, modify and lock inputs to different displays, and inject HDR where it isn’t available. It’s so dense that I’ve written specifically about Special K for my ReSpec column previously — and even then, I was only able to scratch the surface of what it’s capable of.
Special K is a global tool; you can use it with any game short of those with anti-cheat software. However, it includes a handful of adjustments for specific titles, including Elden Ring. The most immediately noticeable one is an unlocked frame rate. Elden Ring is capped to 60 frames per second (fps) on PC, but Special K can remove the cap.
It also enables a few quality-of-life features. Special K includes optional PlayStation button prompts if you’re using a DualSense or DualShock controller, which aren’t available in Elden Ring natively. You can also disable the game’s interface for screenshots through Special K.
Unfortunately, those features aren’t currently working for Elden Ring. According to the app’s developer, From Software rewrote the code for the frame rate limiter in the game, which broke Special K.
