Elden Ring

Why this game, specifically

Elden Ring is capped, so there is no headroom to win: every improvement has to come from removing a stall. The two stalls Windows has any bearing on are shader compilation and streaming contention. ORION configures the driver shader cache and audits what else is competing for the disk, and does not claim it can raise a capped frame rate.

What ORION checks

• Graphics configuration: Windows graphics preferences, DirectX shader and pipeline caches, and presentation settings the OS controls.
• Storage housekeeping: temporary data, launcher caches and driver shader caches that grow without bound.
• Background activity: startup entries, scheduled tasks and always-running apps that take CPU time while a game has it.
• Memory pressure: page-file configuration, memory compression state and the caching services that compete for RAM.

Recommended changes

Broadly appropriate, low expected side effects, and reversible where the badge says so. These are catalog entries, not a script: ORION reads the current value on your PC first and skips anything already set.

• Enable Game Modegame-mode SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Turns on Windows Game Mode so the OS prioritizes the active game.

• Enable Auto Game Modegamebar-auto-mode SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Lets Windows automatically apply Game Mode when a game is detected.

• Disable Game Bar background recordinggamebar-bg-off SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Keeps Game Bar background recording off until you turn it back on.

• Disable Xbox Game DVRgame-dvr-off SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Stops Xbox Game DVR from recording in the background while you play.

• Reduce gaming notificationsfocus-assist-gaming SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Turns off a common notification surface while leaving Windows security notifications alone.

• Maximize DirectX shader cachedx-shader-cache-max SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Maximizes the DirectX shader cache to reduce compilation stutters.

• Enable DirectX PSO disk cachedx-pso-cache-enable SafeFreeReversibleNo restart

  Enables D3D12 PSO disk cache for faster shader pipeline loading.

• Clean NVIDIA DirectX shader cacheclean-nvidia-dx-cache SafeFreeNot reversibleNo restart

  Clears NVIDIA's DirectX shader cache (rebuilds automatically).

Advanced options

Legitimate changes with real trade-offs: hardware dependence, power draw, or behaviour that varies between systems. ORION shows these separately, records the previous value before writing, and never folds them into a one-click run.

• Disable memory compressionmemory-compression-off ModerateFreeNot reversibleRestart required

  Turns off RAM compression so paged-out memory goes to the pagefile instead.

• NTFS large memory cachentfs-memory-usage-max ModerateFreeNot reversibleRestart required

  Increases the NTFS in-memory cache for heavy file workloads; reversible, needs a restart.

• NVIDIA Prefer maximum performancegpu-nvidia-powermizer-max ModerateEliteReversibleNo restart

  Sets NVIDIA Control Panel power management to Prefer maximum performance via the official driver API.

Trade-offs and limits

• Shader-cache cleanup frees space but forces the next run to rebuild the cache, so the first session after a clean can stutter more, not less.
• Storage and memory options are the ones that most depend on how much RAM and what kind of drive you have. ORION reads both before it recommends anything.
• Vendor power and scheduling options depend on the driver you have installed. ORION checks for the control it is about to write and marks the tweak unsupported when it is not there.

ORION does not publish a frame-rate figure for Elden Ring, because we do not have reproducible before-and-after data for your hardware. What the app can do is capture frames on your PC, in your game, before and after a change, and show you that.