Before going any further, please note that the following information is all in regards to desktop PCs, this information may not be useful for laptops and not everything may be feasible on a laptop. If you are on a laptop choose to do these at your own risk.

The guide as a whole is meant to encourage you to understand some of these issues and fix them yourself in the future. It's meant to promote critical thinking and practical experience. The reason you go down the list is because it's designed to go from least intrusive onward and they all follow clear patterns. Some people have never heard of WinDbg, Intel XTU or Parkcontrol. I implore you to understand what you're using so that you can come out better for it. Not just your computer benefits, but you benefit.

If you're too lazy to read the entire guide or just want the likely answer, there is a TLDR section that tells you what to use, however I suggest you do the standard practices first to eliminate any possible issues (or you can use the tool and come back if it doesn't work).

If you are looking to alleviate your stuttering, I have done a lot of analyzing of the game engines interaction with cpu thread scheduling, I have come to a consensus and my findings are listed down below in the "the actual problem" section.

None of the listed information is guaranteed to work, please be aware that some may find this useful and effective while others may find that it doesn't help. If you have a specific issue that isn't answered here, please utilize the forums, there are a few helpful and knowledgeable people in the community that can and will likely lend a hand.

These are workarounds, not fixes, please keep that in mind.

I have long since retired from the field, there are those out there that will know more than me, that being said I'm not oblivious and do my best to figure out the why, so I am sharing my understanding. This is my best inference given my understanding of hardware/software interaction and personal testing. This does not mean I am infallible as it is a nuanced inference, I strongly suggest you look up official documentation, do your own testing and research.

The standard practice suggestions might help with some crashes, they are standard practice in troubleshooting and are good starting points, you should understand each step before you do it, be sure to research it and don't skip steps, it is also good practice to create system restore points when doing something like bios updates or reinstalling drivers, not every suggestion is here as this is a guide based around stuttering, but there is overlap.

If you're looking at this for crashing, analyze your crash logs in eventviewer, reliability monitor or WinDbg and research your exception codes. They will at least point you in the right direction. These steps are preliminary, if crashes persist, use collected data to guide investigation.

I have personally tested the hyperthreading, parkcontrol and ultimate power plan profile suggestions on a 14900kf, each individually and have seen a genuine benefit from all 3. I can only attest to the efficacy of my own tests, the rest are standard practice suggestions.

I have also tested process lasso to set priority and affinity on a 14900kf and a 5900x, both saw performance improvement when this was done, this leads me to believe thread scheduling might be a significant contributor to the majority of stutters in this game.

This list is set in a logical progression starting from top to bottom, you should do each one individually and only after reading the entire section for it.

Both test systems were tested under normal conditions and also reformatted with a freshly installed OS to rule out user variability.

Full test system specs

You can verify the integrity of your game files on steam to try and replace any corrupted files

Start the game in offline mode, this makes the game not start EAC, you can then run some solo games to see if the game runs normally without issues, with EAC turned off you can also change the process priority and affinity, if you're still experiencing stuttering you can try changing the priority of the exe to high or the affinity to specific cpus (specifically cpu 0, 2, 4, 6, etc). You can experiment with assigning affinity to physical cores, which often correspond to alternating CPUs (e.g., 0, 2, 4…), but this depends on your CPU architecture. Tools like CoreTemp or Process Lasso can help you determine which CPUs are physical cores.

This can relieve some stuttering as it stops the game from overloading certain cores, if you notice this does indeed alleviate some stuttering, you should look into using process lasso (the link is found later in the guide) since EAC stops you from changing priority and affinity.

If your game functions better in offline mode without EAC enabled, I suggest reinstalling/repairing EAC from the files provided with the game.

"Drive:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN\Game\easyanticheat\easyanticheat_eos_setup.exe"

Turn down some of your graphic settings, this is not because your gpu can't handle the load, it's more so because some graphic settings also have some cpu load, the game is cpu bound so the majority of the time stutters are caused by that and not the gpu.

Some users have reported that changing the game from fullscreen to windowed or borderless windowed mode has helped.

This is for nvidia gpus, try going to your nvidia control panel and disabling DSR

Nvidia Control Panel>Manage 3D Settings>DSR Factors>uncheck all options and apply. (make note of the settings before changing them so you can change them back if you wish to)

DSR is usually disabled by default, but if it's enabled then you should disable it to see if the stuttering resolves itself.

Many users have reported that the following has helped them, go to your nvidia control panel found at

Nvidia control panel>3D Settings>Program Settings>Nightreign.exe and changing the following settings

Max Frame Rate - 60 <- this ensures the gpu driver and game engine are communicating together properly

Power Management Mode - Prefer Maximum Performance <- this setting is usually handled automatically by windows which chooses based on system performance, sometimes windows will choose power saving mode instead.

Shader Cache Size - Unlimited <- Some settings can put a limit on the shader cache size which can cause the shader compilation to not properly compile and have corrupted shaders.

Use DDU [www.wagnardsoft.com](display driver uninstaller) to remove your gpu drivers, then install drivers from 5 version behind the latest (for nvidia 566.36 is the version sweet spot that sees a lot of success), make sure you use DDU while in safe mode.

A small caveat is if you're using a 50xx nvidia gpu, you may not be able to roll back your drivers due to how new the gpu is, if this is the case you can try rolling back by 5 versions (just ensure your driver version supports your gpu).

open an elevated (administrator privilege) command prompt
run the following command
sfc /scannow
This will scan windows for possible corrupted files, if it says everything is fine, you don't need to do the next step, if it fails to remove/repair files for whatever reason you then run the following command
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
After running this command, then run
sfc /scannow

Some stutter can be caused by corrupted vc++ redistributable, reinstall/repair them, the installer will prompt you if you need to restart, restart after both are done if it doesn't.

Official Microsoft VC++[learn.microsoft.com]

You want to get both the x86 and x64.

Disable XMP via bios temporarily to see if it's causing stability issues. (Be sure to note which xmp you have enabled so you can revert your change after testing this suggestion).

This is not necessary per-se, it's just to rule out the stuttering being caused by faulty RAM I suggest downloading Memtest86[www.memtest86.com] onto a usb flash drive and using it to test your memory modules, you should do a full test and if your ram passes with no issues then your RAM is clean and likely isn't contributing to the problem.

You typically want to let memtest run 3 full passes to ensure it catches everything, testing should be done with all modules, if one fails you will need to start a process of elimination.

Alternatively you can run the less robust windows memory diagnostic, this might not catch deep issues but is usually sufficient unless there is a deep problem. Run memtest if you want to be thorough.

If your RAM fails to pass the full memtest pass, then you should look into RMAing or replacing your RAM as it is defective.

Please note memtest can take a few hours to run, it's not a 15m ordeal.

If the aforementioned don't work you can also check to ensure your bios is up to date (sometimes outdated bios can cause stuttering issues due to misconfiguration or regression), go to your motherboard manufacturer's website and check what the latest firmware version for bios there is for your motherboard model, ensure it's not a beta driver.

You can get into the bios (the usual way is pressing a specific key which is different with every manufacturer, msi is delete for example, it's also displayed at the bottom of your screen on startup) on startup and check the version you have before going further, then cross-reference with the latest bios firmware version you looked up previously to see if you should update or not.

Most motherboards have a special method to install bios updates such as m-flash, make sure you look up how to use whatever proprietary installer your motherboard uses.

This will require a usb stick, and getting into the bios itself (normally pressing delete during boot), I cannot stress enough that you cannot lose power to the pc, turn it off or suffer from a crash during this process as you can cause the pc to be inoperable if it happens. Please take precautions such as a UPS (Uninterruptible power supply).

I suggest you create a system restore point before attempting this.

Please note if you're uncomfortable with this you can skip this and save it for last, it is probably the most dangerous step if done wrong

While not always the case sometimes the cpu struggles due to it being too aggressively overclocked by the bios (boost technology), you can try downloading Intel XTU[www.intel.com] and lowering your p-core efficiency down 2 points from whatever it was, for example if your efficiency is x57, make it x55 (for example mine was at x58 but i toned it down to x52 in order to circumvent the 14th gen voltage issues) if it's x53, make it x51 etc (I know this seems counterintuitive), some higher end intel systems have weird instability quirks at higher clock speeds, essentially this is downclocking your system by 200mhz in an effort to promote stability, this is also a solution for unreal engine 5 crashes in other games.

It should be noted that 200mhz is a small negligible downclock, it shouldn't be noticeable in average gaming use.

A small caveat is that some pre-built PCs prevent you from using intel XTU to change p-core frequency, to get around this you need to contact the company you got your PC from and ask them about it. (They may also be able to help).

Please note that you should only try this near the end if possible, there's no reason to downclock if something else works.

Revert changes here if you experience instability or noticeable performance loss.

To be clear these don't always work, but it is worth trying as they have seen success

Parkcontrol is the preferred method for what is suggested below as you don't lose performance for it but the trade off is slightly higher thermals on the cpu, however if you have proper cooling then you shouldn't have an issue.

To be doubly clear, this is an issue with the game engine, not your system, the suggestion below is a workaround, not an actual fix, it's on the devs to properly fix it in a later update.

Normally the go to change is to change process priority to high+ and set the process affinity manually, however EAC stops us from doing this, necessitating things like parkcontrol or process lasso.

Parkcontrol will increase power draw. If your CPU and GPU are already pushing your PSU’s wattage limit, this added load may cause system instability or crashes. Before applying these settings, calculate your system’s total power consumption under full load and ensure it stays well below your PSU’s rated output.

Turn off the changes in parkcontrol (change your power plan) if you're not playing nightreign, there's no reason to stress your cpu needlessly with thermals.

Parkcontrol can alleviate some crashing as it can improve the thread scheduling found via null pointer deferences, thread synchronization (0xc0000005) or poor asset streaming

You may be able to simulate what parkcontrol does by using the "Ultimate performance power plan" (thereby making parkcontrol not needed) in the power options as it's supposed to disable coreparking, but this will lead to higher thermals. Using the windows power plan unparks all cores, parkcontrol will let you unpark cores individually.

What works here should also work for elden ring as they both use similar engines.

Always read official documentation so you know what you're using and how to use it

This is a more advanced step if those above don't work

To clarify I am basing this inference off my knowledge as a former cybersecurity analyst and my understanding of modern cpu hybrid architecture. My understanding could be incorrect or dated, however this should be largely correct. I highly suggest you do your own tests to confirm or challenge my findings.

High end systems having the stutter issue appear to involve poor thread scheduling (this is most notably seen on 12th-14th gen Intel cpus and modern AMD cpus), the game basically tells the OS to give it a thread to work with but doesn't tell it to give it a p core thread, so the scheduler sometimes assigns things to logical cores (which share resources with some other cores) or parked e-cores which can cause it to delay on wake up, causing the micro stuttering.

There are realistically 2 options to try and alleviate this and those are to either turn off ht/smt to eliminate logical cores and force the system to only use physical cores (this limits the chance of improper thread scheduling as it limits the options the OS has) or to use a program like parkcontrol to manually force cores to not be parked and thus, "always awake"

This nudges the OS to prefer the always-awake cores, since they’re more efficient than parked or logical cores, which usually results in better thread scheduling.

Disabling ht/smt usually sees a performance hit (usually around 5% but it depends on the program in use) and most modern games utilize ht/smt properly. Do not turn it off unless nothing else works, I do not suggest keeping ht/smt off unless you're desperate to play.

This game unfortunately uses an older FromSoftware engine that doesn't differentiate between p cores, e cores or logical cores, so it struggles to work on high end systems sometimes.

Basically the game engine is outdated and doesn't know how to handle modern hardware thread scheduling due to the hybrid architecture.

You can find parkcontrol here[bitsum.com]

You're looking to activate the "bitsum highest performance profile"

Parkcontrol creates and activates a power plan profile, equipped with options that aren't normally available in the normal gui, since powercfg is beyond the ken of most users, this provides a user friendly way to do that without needing or worrying about knowing what commands to use.

Some coreparking was offloaded to the firmware for the cpu chip on modern cpus (the thread director and cppc2 influences coreparking decisions), this affects how thread scheduling works, which is possibly why we are seeing these issues on modern cpus and not on some older ones. Though similar issues (stuttering) are being experienced on non-hybrid architecture which may mean that the game likely doesn't give the OS enough information to thread schedule efficiently.

The issue with the way thread scheduling is handled for the game is that it sometimes feels fine and other times feels awful (adel), I suspect this could also be caused by the asset streaming thread being overloaded (you can look in task manager during fights and see what's being utilized) or not prioritized (asset streaming core is parked).

You can also download Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) via the Microsoft Website[learn.microsoft.com] and use Windows Performance Recorder (WPR) to record some data while using WPA to read it and do some more thorough digging into what's being utilized as well as what affinities and priorities are set. I highly suggest you look up official documentation for WPA.

The Elden Ring engine has been notorious at handling multithreading poorly, this makes the issue a bit difficult to alleviate and relatively nuanced. Parkcontrol isn't a silver bullet but it does strike at the likely root issue (the game not giving the OS enough direction to assign threads efficiently) by giving the OS more options to choose thread scheduling that aren't poor choices.

You can also try and use Process Lasso[bitsum.com] instead of parkcontrol if you're only looking to set process priorities and affinities, which is made by the same developers that make parkcontrol.

You can set it to the nightreign.exe, the easyanticheat_eos.exe and start_protected_game.exe

Due to how EAC interacts, the nightreign.exe affinity changes may not stay unless you apply them to the protected exe and/or eac exe.

The game heavily loads cpu 0, so you can try taking it off cpu 0 which should force the load to rebalance itself in a more sustainable way.

Parkcontrol is likely to see more benefit than process lasso as changing affinity can cause the game to crash in some scenarios. If you start crashing after doing any changes (and weren't crashing before), ensure you revert those changes.

again, please look up official documentation so you understand what you're using, process lasso is a powerful tool that can cause more problems than it fixes if you mess with too many settings.

6/18/2025
Through further testing, I’ve found that stuttering is not limited to hybrid CPUs, non-hybrid systems like the Ryzen 5900X also exhibit issues. This suggests that the core problem may be the game engine’s failure to give sufficient thread scheduling direction to the OS, rather than any specific CPU design. The inconsistency of stutter behavior across identical or similar systems lends credence to this train of thought. In such cases, using ParkControl to ensure cores are unparked provides the OS with more predictable options for scheduling, which often reduces stuttering when other methods fail. Basically, once again, the game engine doesn’t provide the OS with proper thread scheduling guidance, which causes the OS to struggle inconsistently on its own. This makes ParkControl (and, if all else fails, disabling HT/SMT) the most likely methods to alleviate stuttering if none of the other options have. Keep in mind this doesn't guarantee threads will be scheduled properly, it only improves the odds by reducing the chances of poor core selection by the OS

To be clear I believe the thread scheduling isn't being properly guided by the game engine, which is why we see stutters even when using parkcontrol sometimes (like my 5900x still stuttering sometimes, specifically with adel, even with the parkcontrol change, but not my 14900kf which also has the parkcontrol change), this leads me to believe that even if the cores are unparked the OS is still deciding to schedule things to the logical core associated with cpu 0 (the usual asset streaming core), as mentioned before logical cores share resources with a physical core, so what I believe is happening is that the OS is routinely scheduling things to the logical core associated with the asset streaming core which might be causing the stutter, again this is inference based on the behavior and testing results. I highly suggest you do your own research.

6/19/2025
Okay, some context, I have a 14900kf which means I have 32 total cores to work with, 0-15 are p-cores (even numbers) and their ht created counterparts (odd numbers).

I've started to analyze some ETL (found below, in "the actual problem" section) files that I recorded of nightreign through WPR and have noticed a rather worrying development. The game starts off great, scheduling to core 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 (these are physical cores on my system), but as the game continues it schedules to higher and higher cores (11, 14, 15, up until 31 on my system). There are a number of times later in the run (usually around day 2 and the nightboss) that it starts to schedule threads to core 16+ which are the less efficient and usually parked e-cores, there is also many instances where the thread scheduling will schedule to a core that isn't ideal (WPA explains that it was scheduled to cpu 21 but the ideal cpu was 2, these cause stutter and they seem to be common). What's even more interesting is that it never goes back down to any of the lower cores, it only increases and stays at core 31 (however this was a single run and could see different behavior if i started another one right away), this tells me that the game has a thread scheduling issue. I've also noticed that the game process is at a permanent 11 (sometimes it gets dropped to 9, sometimes upped to 15) in the priority list (normal) instead of 16+ (high), this means that it's not pinned, nothing is boosted so the OS schedules things to the E-core and logical processors which is causing the stuttering. This is absolutely a game engine issue.

I highly suggest you use WPR to record the last 10 minutes of a match (recording a full 45m of a match eats ram)

You can follow my steps by using Windows Performance Recorder (downloaded by the APK in the Parkcontrol section), open an elevated command prompt (I suggest you do this mid game, near the end of day 2 or before you typically have stutter issues) and type the following

wpr -start CPU -filemode

Then complete the run, once the run is completed type the following

wpr -stop C:\NightreignTrace.etl
Or
wpr -stop NightreignTrace.etl

If you use the command without a filepath it will save it to whatever directory your command prompt is currently in (usually C:\windows\system32)

Once done you can open Windows Performance Analyzer and open the etl file that you saved, this will take a bit and will eat your ram considerably once it opens, I don't suggest doing other things while you check this just for the sake of not having to worry about ram issues.

You want to look at CPU Usage Precise and look at the nightreign.exe, this will let you see process priority, cpu affinity and any delays there may be in changing cores.

This basically means that using process lasso to set process affinity and priority or using parkcontrol should largely reduce or eliminate stutters.

6/20/2025
I've done some more digging and have realized that there is a very real possibility that some of the disconnects that happen with the game could be the fault of poor thread scheduling. While I haven't found any concrete proof yet, the results I have been seeing regarding the game engine and the way the OS thread schedules for the game show that threads are being starved or suffering from contention regularly, this means that some disconnects could result from that if the network thread were to suffer from those issues. Again this isn't fact just another inference on my part.

To be clear most of the time network disconnects aren't due to something like thread scheduling, I am just noting that it's possible due to the way the thread scheduling is behaving with the game.

Upon further testing with parkcontrol disabled and enabled, ultimate performance power plan and process lasso to boost priority and affinity, I have found that parkcontrol is the most reliable tool to alleviate stuttering. The others will alleviate some stutter but they don't alleviate to the extent that parkcontrol does and parkcontrol is likely to alleviate the majority of it. The WPA results I have been analyzing suggest that even with priority boosted for the exe that mismanaged thread scheduling will still happen, this means that the game process even with boosted priority isn't getting the resources it needs because the game engine is hinting (or lack thereof) to the OS to core migrate toward e-cores. In my testing parkcontrol largely eliminates stuttering almost entirely on both a 14900kf and a 5900x (a hybrid cpu and a non-hybrid one).

Threads are routinely being starved or suffering from contention with ridiculously high wait times that seem to become more common the further into a run you get. There is also a big concern that the game process is migrating slowly to e-cores and logical cores (in my testing it migrated to e-cores on the 14900kf and to logical cores on the 5900x), routinely causing thread starvation with high wait times due to improper scheduling as evidenced by the assigned cpu core and the ideal cpu being mismatched and coinciding with the stutters that happen in game.

In my testing parkcontrol has largely circumvented the stuttering on both test systems, for the 14900kf parkcontrol has removed all stuttering when deactivating core parking, for the 5900x it has largely seen less sutters and only stutters during significant moments like adel, Judging by the WPA results I'm inclined to believe this is likely due to the logical core being overloaded. I have tested the 5900x with SMT turned off to see if it made a noticeable difference and I did notice less stuttering with and without parkcontrol, adel didn't stutter the system, which was a huge improvement. However disabling SMT for a singular game isn't exactly realistic but it is a workaround if you're desperate to play the game. Basically using parkcontrol should largely reduce any issues with stuttering you're experiencing, I will continue to update this guide with any new findings I make.

As I explain above (6/19/2025) the actual problem is thread scheduling, I will now show you screenshots of my WPA results.






Basically the game doesn't guide the OS properly for scheduling purposes because it doesn't set a priority above normal, the game is treated like every other process currently open and lesser compared to any process with high+ priority, this makes it schedule threads poorly because the OS doesn't know to give the game better resources. Which is why we see tons of stuttering, use process lasso and set your affinities and priorities (honestly setting the priority to high or highest should be more than enough), this should largely get rid of any stuttering.

It should be noted that if you experience a lot of disconnects that thread scheduling could be at fault here if the network thread is suffering from contention or is being starved like some of the threads shown above in the images. My tests don't prove this is happening but they do show that it can based on the scheduling behavior.

If you want to alleviate the majority of stuttering you should consider using parkcontrol and/or process lasso to unpark your e-cores (if you have them) and set the priority of nightreign to high

It should be noted however that using parkcontrol/process lasso in this way may not remove all stutters, the WPA results paint a telling picture that shows that the OS thread scheduling may still improperly schedule things, the game process being scheduled to a core other than the ideal one causes a stutter (this actually seems to happen very often), this may still be an issue even with parkcontrol or process lasso in certain situations (adel), but they should largely alleviate most stuttering.

This is unfortunately very likely to be an engine level issue and isn't something we can directly influence, the best we can do is utilize tools like parkcontrol and process lasso to largely circumvent the process priority changes being blocked by EAC and the cores being unparked to avoid some microsuttering. If you can figure out which affinities to set this would largely alleviate the issue (outside of specific scenarios like adel).

I cannot stress enough if you plan on doing the affinity changes with process lasso that you should do your research for your cpu to properly know which cpu's are physical cores, logical duplications and e-cores (if they exist on your cpu) and read the documentation for process lasso.

But again, the best we can do is mitigate the issue by using parkcontrol to unpark cores and process lasso to set process priority, until FromSoftware fix the poor thread scheduling guidance found in the engine (I wouldn't hold my breath considering elden ring still has this issue), we are left to our own devices to mitigate it.

You will likely see more success with parkcontrol than process lasso, I highly suggest using parkcontrol over it. The WPA results imply that even with priority escelation that thread mismanagement is still likely to happen.

6/21/2025
I have done some more digging with various ETL analysis (without parkcontrol enabled), the following tests were done after the game had been running for a few hours and was done at roundtable hold, I have noticed a reoccurring pattern, the game routinely starves threads or causes contention, note the image below.


The game is typically readying at 50us or less for most threads, this is normal behavior and actually good. but I've noticed some inconsistency with the threads themselves, as noted by the image above, many threads at various times in the trace are being randomly starved, note the ready time (2nd column) and the last switch out and next switch in columns, they tell you when the threads are scheduled, these are fine, there's no evidence of any issues from these metrics alone, the issue starts to show when you look at the ready (us), wait (us), cpu and ideal cpu (columns 5, 6, 10 and 11). There isn't any evidence of whole frames being lost, just stuttering.


What's worrying is the total number of waits far outweighs the ready by about 3x, which means there's likely thread contention somewhere in the pipeline or possibly an asset loading issue. Looking further into this shows that there's an interesting pattern, most contention isn't happening at specific moments, but randomly throughout the trace, even to threads that seemingly don't have an issue. A lot of the threads have very high wait times, this isn't bad per-se but the massive amount of threads waiting shows there's an issue happening during the scheduling process because they're waiting too long (which is detrimental for a video game that relies on responsive combat if there's contention).

The high ready times signify thread starvation, this is also happening randomly throughout the scheduling process and does not coincide with high wait times but often coincides with cpu assignment being mismatched from the ideal cpu, this usually causes a stutter by itself, it's not as common as the thread contention issue but is likely why fights like adel stutter so much, his assets might not load in properly due to thread starvation and the stuttering happens.


Lastly the reason for this is likely due to an engine level flaw or an OS scheduling quirk (though considering we can see this issue in the base elden ring, I'm more inclined to think engine flaw), but looking at the reasoning via the trace shows that the vast majority of these are down to "userrequest, wrpreempted and wryieldexecution" , basically what this means is,
userrequest spikes are waiting on something requested by the game engine.
wrpreempted spikes are threads being kicked off the cpu early.
wryieldexecution is normal and doesn't indicate anything worrying.
There are also many indications of WrDispatchInt, WrQuantumEnd, WrResource, WrAlertByThreadId wait reasons which can all affect stuttering.

The combination of all these wait reasons leads me to believe that the likely problem is core parking itself, based on the patterns the threading model relies on consistent, uninterrupted execution which core parking disrupts. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that the engine is waiting for resources but the OS is seeing delays

This is likely why parkcontrol seems to see the most success, because the changes it makes to the power plan change how the OS behaves in thread scheduling.

6/22/2025
I have done some more testing (this time with parkcontrol on) and have found that the game sees better thread scheduling with parkcontrol on. There is a significant drop in cpu vs ideal cpu mismatches which directly correlates to less stuttering, there is also less ready which correlates to less thread starvation, this is because parkcontrol changes how the OS thread scheduling behaves. It's not a fix but it is a mitigation that sees benefit. Unfortunately this will be different for everyone and will highly depend on how many cores, e-cores or logical processors you have, a 14900kf will see more benefit from this (due to its high core count) than a lower core cpu will.(but should still show a measurable difference). I did however notice a significant jump in waits but in my testing I never came across any stutters while using parkcontrol which means while there is more waits, there's less thread contention. What does this mean? This basically means that the game engine doesn't change but the behavior by the OS scheduler does, threads are "waiting patiently" instead of fighting for screen time, by unparking cores it alleviates bad core selection and thus poor thread scheduling, it doesn't eliminate it just makes it less likely to happen.

6/24/2025
I am currently in the process of gathering several traces with WPR and analyzing them, once this is done and I've correlated the issues I'll post my findings here.

With the update on 6/26/2025 I'm going to take new traces and try to compare the two to see if I can narrow down any performance improvements (or lack thereof) that may have been made, this may unfortunately take more time.

An update to what I've seen so far just from playing is that, without parkcontrol, the stuttering appears to be better but not fully gone (there was less stuttering overall during gameplay) but the bosses, specifically gaping jaw and darkdrift knight both still have bad stuttering issues, I'll take some WPR traces and see if any behavior has changed between the game engine and thread scheduling.

I have noticed that CPU 0 and CPU 2 are basically pinned at 100% during boss fights, this is just from preliminary testing and not indicative of anything, just noticing the pattern before obtaining the WPR traces.

During this process, if you've noticed anything yourself, feel free to share, it might direct me to a revelation or reveal a flaw I didn't consider. Check back for updates, I will post more once I have more information.

7/9/2025
I've gathered the WPA traces and have compiled the data, but everything I've found appears to show the same or similar data we've seen previously in the other traces. I'll update the information if I find something that differs from the data already presented.

Original Post
For clarity, cpupower allows you to do things on linux that parkcontrol does on windows.

Average Tea Enjoyer
Just in case you want to add something for my linux-gaming comrades: installing cpupower and setting the cpu-governers to performance seems to have fixed the EAC related lags on my system

Original Post

Ryanst
This guy on reddit u/suscit found a fix that worked for me.

The fix:
"Go to mouse options-> additional mouse settings -> pointer options -> enable "display pointer trails" -> and put display pointer trails to the shortest"

just disable it again when not playing the game. :er_wave:

The following link might explain why parkcontrol works better than I've explained it, if you're still confused by what parkcontrol is, what it does or how to use it, consider giving the following a read.

Reddit elden ring park control

Parkcontrol's main page[bitsum.com]

If none of these helped alleviate your issues, I highly suggest you reach out to other knowledgeable people in the community or post on the forums where others can assist you. The important part is not who takes care of the problem but that the problem is taken care of.

There is also the official Elden Ring Discord[discord.gg] where you can get help from someone if needed, there is an extensive community help thread for both elden ring and nightreign. I also suggest visiting the Nightreign Reddit or the Elden Ring Reddit if you need extra assistance.

The majority of stutters in this game (assuming you tried all the standard practice suggestions and came out clean) is likely caused by poor thread scheduling guidance by the game engine.

Use Process Lasso[bitsum.com] to manually set the nightreign.exe process to high priority and/or use Parkcontrol[bitsum.com]to unpark your cores, this should largely reduce stuttering, however certain scenarios like adel may still see stuttering due to an engine level issue, on certain setups, parkcontrol and process lasso might not do much due to a flaw in the engine, we can't do anything about that so our only course of action is mitigation with the aforementioned tools.

For parkcontrol you're looking to activate the "bitsum highest performance" profile (be sure to go back to balanced power plan when you're not playing nightreign)

Please note that you will likely see more success with parkcontrol than you will with process lasso, the WPA results tell me that even with higher priority it'll likely still mismanage threads.

Please also note parkcontrol may not always work, explanations as to why it does or doesn't are shown earlier in the guide

Again please remember to read official documentation on parkcontrol and process lasso so you understand what you're using.

If this didn't help you then start from the top.

To be clear the following in this section is just me thinking out loud, it's not the case and more me ruminating on the possibility.

After gathering information about what systems aren't exhibiting stutters and some thought, I have a new inference to share. From what I've observed many people that are not suffering from stutters have less than 24 20 threads for their CPU (this could explain why the 5900x didn't stutter when smt was disabled), what this makes me think is that the game engine is probably not optimized for higher thread counts and is likely seeing issues in the OS scheduling behavior because the game doesn't provide any hints to it, so there's more room for error on higher thread/core counts.

My test systems were 14900kf and 5900x, both of which saw the stutter problem, it seems that some of those not having the issue are on cpus with less than 24 20 threads. I'm starting to suspect that the issue might become more obvious the stronger the cpu, not because it can't handle the game but because the OS scheduling behavior can become "unoptimized" due to it having more space to work with (especially since the game engine doesn't give the OS any hints for scheduling purposes). Parkcontrol essentially influences this behavior to be more predictable with the game engine, which means the most probable issue is an outdated engine that can't properly handle higher-end hardware from 2021+

Basically my thought is the game engine probably doesn't know how to handle more than 16 threads efficiently, we can't know this for sure because we don't have access to dev files, but I suspect this may be the case overall.

Though, due to the nondeterministic behavior of thread scheduling in practice this won't always be the case, some configurations on higher end systems may show no signs of stuttering at all.

Please read the associated section before downloading anything.

GPU Drivers
Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU)[www.wagnardsoft.com]

VC++
Official Microsoft VC++ Redistributable[learn.microsoft.com]

RAM Testing
Memtest86[www.memtest86.com]

Intel Specific
Intel XTU[www.intel.com]

Parkcontrol / Hyperthreading
ParkControl[bitsum.com]
Official Microsoft WPA & WPR ADK[learn.microsoft.com]

Alternative to Parkcontrol, Process Lasso
Process Lasso[bitsum.com]

Special Mentions / Overall Community
Elden Ring Parkcontrol - Reddit
Elden Ring Discord[discord.gg]
Elden Ring Reddit
Nightreign Reddit

Thank you for reading and I hope some of this helped. If a friend is having issues, be sure to share the guide.

If anything in this guide worked, please consider leaving a comment, like or award as it lets others know that there's actionable information.

I enjoy looking deeply into systems so it would be touching to know that what I've found has helped or improved others. Thank you again.

If you learned anything from this guide, consider favoriting and please share it with others who are also struggling with the game.

Enjoy the game hopefully stutter-free and better equipped to apply this knowledge to other games as well!

Remember that troubleshooting and testing is a community effort, do your own research, test your hypothesis, and never take someone solely at their word, always do your own research and look up official documentation. No answer is wrong if it pushes the needle safely.

None of my findings or original thought processes will be removed, if I conclude a different answer for whatever reason I will add my new thought process so that others can see and possibly learn from it.

Remember some of the things here may work in elden ring due to engine similarities. A lot of these steps can be applied to other games as well. Hope this has helped!