I played ‘Elden Ring Nightreign’ on the RTX 5090, Intel Arc 140V, and AMD Radeon 8060S — here’s what happened

Are you ready, Nightfarers? I battle-bused my way down to Limveld in Elden Ring Nightreign and got a proper hazing from the Night Lords, all so I can tell you how this monster performs.

Elden Ring Nightreign is the latest entry into FromSoftware’s medley of masochist nightmares, a co-op roguelike spin-off of its renowned namesake. It’s not just an asset-reskin, either — the combat got a much-needed rework to allow for smoother mobility and even unique movesets. Now, it has its problems mechanically… and performance-wise.

I played Elden Ring Nightreign on the HP Omen Max 16 (RTX 5090), the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15 Gen 1 Aura Edition (Intel Arc 140V), and the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (AMD Radeon 8060S). My plan was to initially play it only on an RTX 5090 and see how it ran, but you’ll see why that plan went out of the window in a moment.

Here’s what happened.

How I (night)fared in Elden Ring Nightreign

After I finished fangirling over the menu music, I jumped right into Nightreign on Maximum settings at 2560 x 1600 with the HP Omen Max 16, which features the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU — the best GPU commercially available.

It’s important to note that there are no customizable DLSS 4 settings within Elden Ring Nightreign, so I couldn’t enable DLAA or anything like that, which would boost visuals and performance. Technically, I could use DLSS 4 Override to change some settings via the Nvidia app, like turning on Multi-Frame Generation, but unfortunately, that was irrelevant.

Why? Well, like Elden Ring and nearly every other FromSoftware game, Nightreign is capped at a sad 60 frames per second. As you might imagine, the most powerful gaming laptop around was more than capable of hitting that cap. So, fps performance data is effectively useless.

I did want to measure the latency, which is super important for multiplayer games, but Nvidia’s performance-measuring software FrameView doesn’t pick up Nightreign’s latency numbers. That’s likely because FromSoftware didn’t include latency markers to measure that exact data.

However, despite crushing that 60-fps cap, I experienced some performance hiccups while playing Nightreign.

One issue I had was Nightreign not saving my setting to Borderless Windowed mode, instead switching back to Fullscreen. This became an issue when I alt-tabbed at the beginning of an expedition, and the whole game slowed down to a crawl. I wasn’t the only one who experienced it either — my whole team got the same lag spike. You might think it’s a coincidence, but when I switched my setting back to Borderless, the lag stopped and the game loaded normally. I did host the session, so it may have had something to do with that.

Another huge issue I clocked was some choppy network performance. I raced to speak with God in the churches across Limveld, and it felt smooth as butter. But when we got to the creatively named Gaping Jaw boss of the second expedition, all of our games experienced massive frame drops when it started to yeet some lightning at us. This seemed more like a network issue than a hardware issue since the experience was shared. Yet it happened only when there were a ton of effects on the screen. This is something that must be addressed in an update, either at or post-launch. Needless to say, we died.

Otherwise, playing Elden Ring Nightreign on a $4K+ gaming laptop felt like a dream. But what about a regular old laptop? Yep, I ran Nightreign on the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15 Gen 1 Aura Edition’s Intel Arc 140V iGPU, and it was rough, but not for the reason I expected. I thought the game would crash on startup, but it booted up, and I managed to get to the Roundtable Hold without the game breaking.

At Low, 1200p settings, I managed a decent 30 to 40 fps. That’s way better than what I expected. And when jumping into an expedition, it dropped to 20 to 40 fps. That’s still perfectly fine. But it still managed to be completely unplayable. Why? Frame drops. Every eight to twelve seconds, the fps would tank to 2 to 4 fps for one to three seconds. I did manage to kill an Abductor Virgin (terrible name by the way), but I wouldn’t recommend anyone play the game like this. I even turned the graphics all the way down to 800 x 600 to see if that would help, and it boosted the fps a little bit, but the frame drops remained consistent.

The Omen and ThinkPad showcased the best and worst kind of performance you can experience, respectively. But not all integrated graphics are created equal, which is why I also tackled Nightreign with the Asus ROG Flow Z13’s AMD Radeon 8060S iGPU.

Running performance tests on the Flow Z13 provided a little more variety, but overall, consistently strong numbers. On Maximum settings at 2560 x 1600, the Flow Z13 captured a strong 50 frames per second. I’ve gushed about the Flow Z13’s integrated graphics before, but it’s still damn impressive. Bumping the graphics down yielded 55 fps on High, 57 fps on Medium, and 58 fps on Low. You get some diminishing returns once you start lowering the graphics. Overall, I’d recommend maxing it out and experiencing all that Nightreign has to offer.

I called it out when Elden Ring Nightreign’s PC requirements were announced, but this game can run completely fine on low-end and older hardware. But for the most part, I’d stay away from integrated graphics, unless you got those slick new AMD iGPUs.