Elden Ring Lossless Scaling Settings That Actually Work

Elden Ring still caps out at 60 FPS on a stock install. That hasn't changed since 2022, and FromSoftware has shown zero interest in touching it.

If you've got a 144Hz or 240Hz panel sitting there doing nothing above 60 frames, that's the actual problem this article solves. Lossless Scaling is the cheapest, least invasive way to get real motion smoothness out of the Lands Between without touching game files or risking a softban.

I've run this app across three different rigs — a desktop with an RTX 4090, a mid-range laptop with a mobile RTX 3050, and a Steam Deck OLED — specifically to figure out which settings actually hold up during boss fights instead of just looking good in a static open-world screenshot. Here's what I landed on.

Why Elden Ring Specifically Needs This

Most modern games ship with DLSS or FSR frame generation built in. Elden Ring doesn't, and it never got it added officially, even after the Shadow of the Erdtree patch brought ray tracing to the game.

That leaves PC players with three real options: live with 60 FPS, install a community FPS-unlocker that edits the game's engine limiter, or run an external tool like Lossless Scaling that intercepts the rendered image after the game outputs it.

The unlocker route works, but it comes with a catch worth knowing upfront.

FPS unlockers like UnlockTheFps patch the executable's frame limiter directly
That's a modification to the running game process, and FromSoftware's anti-cheat has flagged similar tools before
Most guides explicitly say to stay offline or use Steam offline mode when running one
Lossless Scaling never touches Elden Ring's files or memory — it just grabs the finished frame off your display output and interpolates on top of it

That distinction is why I default to Lossless Scaling for anyone who plays online or does co-op runs regularly.

There's also a practical reason beyond ban risk. Seamless Co-op and The Convergence, two of the most popular overhaul mods for the base game, both interact with ModEngine in ways that occasionally conflict with executable-level FPS patches. Lossless Scaling sits entirely outside that chain, so it doesn't care what mod loader you're running underneath it.

Inside LSFG 3.1: The Settings That Actually Matter

Lossless Scaling ships with a genuinely overwhelming settings panel. Most of it you can ignore for Elden Ring specifically. Here's the short list that changes actual gameplay feel.

Frame Generation Mode

Set the model to LSFG 3.1, not an older 2.1 profile if your install still defaults to it. The newer model dropped GPU load substantially and cut end-to-end latency by roughly a quarter compared to the previous version, which matters a lot in a game built around parry timing.

Mode: start on Fixed X2, not Adaptive
Adaptive mode targets a display refresh rate and fills in whatever multiplier gets you there, which sounds convenient but produces less predictable frame pacing in combat-heavy scenes
Fixed X2 from a locked 60 FPS base gives you a clean 120 output with the least variance
Only move to X3 or X4 once your base frame rate is already sitting north of 90–100 FPS, and only if your panel actually supports the resulting refresh rate

Resolution Scale and Flow Scale

This is the setting most people skip, and it's the one that saves your frame times when the screen fills with particle effects during a boss's AOE attack.

Leave Resolution Scale at 100% if you're running at 1080p or 1440p with headroom
Drop it to 75% at 1440p or 50% at 4K if you're chasing a high-refresh target and the GPU load from frame gen itself is eating into your base rendering budget
Flow scale around 60–70% is a good middle ground for anyone frame-generating on the same GPU that's rendering the game, since it reduces the optical-flow computation cost without visibly softening motion clarity

Capture API and Sync

Capture API: DXGI works for most people running Elden Ring in borderless windowed mode, which is also the mode you want anyway since exclusive fullscreen occasionally breaks Lossless Scaling's overlay detection
If frames stop generating mid-session, switch to WGC (Windows Graphics Capture) and relaunch — it's the more reliable fallback on newer Windows builds
Sync: set to VSync on with a max refresh rate cap matching your monitor, not "off"
Running two processes side by side (Elden Ring plus the Lossless Scaling overlay) is light on system memory, so this isn't a case where you need to worry about how much RAM you need — 16GB handles it fine even with background capture running

Pro Tip: If you're on a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor, disable variable refresh rate for your Elden Ring session before turning on frame generation. LSFG doesn't support VRR, and running both at once produces worse tearing and stutter than just capping to a fixed refresh rate and letting Lossless Scaling do the smoothing on its own.

Lossless Scaling vs. Every Other Way to Uncap Elden Ring

Method	Target Use Case	Setup Effort	Performance / Quality	Risk & Value
Lossless Scaling (LSFG 3.1)	Anyone wanting smoother motion without touching game files	Low — install, launch alongside game	Good motion smoothing, some ghosting on fast VFX	Low risk, ~$7 one-time cost, works in any game
FPS unlock mods (UnlockTheFps, ModEngine)	Offline players chasing true uncapped native frames	Medium — file placement, config edits	Best possible input feel since it's real frames	Softban risk if used online, no smoothing beyond raw uncap
OptiScaler + FSR3/DLSS-FG injection	Enthusiasts who want native-feeling frame gen	High — DLL swaps, per-game config	Very good quality, fewer artifacts than LSFG	More fragile setup, breaks on game updates
Do nothing (stock 60 FPS cap)	Casual players, competitive-focused players	None	Baseline, zero added latency	Zero cost, zero smoothness gain above 60

Lossless Scaling wins on the effort-to-result ratio. It's not the technically cleanest frame-gen solution on this list, but it's the one that survives a game patch without breaking.

If you're the type who rebuilds your mod list every time FromSoftware ships a balance patch, OptiScaler is worth the extra setup time — the injected FSR3/DLSS-FG pipeline genuinely looks sharper than LSFG's optical-flow approach in slow, deliberate scenes. For anyone who just wants to load in and fight Margit without babysitting DLL versions, Lossless Scaling is the one that keeps working.

My Actual Test Bench Numbers

I ran the same route through Stormveil Castle three times per configuration — open courtyard, torch-lit interior, and the Godrick boss arena — since those three environments stress completely different things.

The desktop rig ran on a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz panel, the laptop on its built-in 1080p 144Hz screen, and the Deck on its own 90Hz OLED display. I used the same LSFG 3.1 build across all three and logged frame times with the app's built-in overlay rather than a separate capture tool, since that's what most readers will actually be looking at while they tune settings.

RTX 4090 desktop, 1440p, native settings maxed: locked 60 FPS base, LSFG 3.1 Fixed X2 pushed a clean 120 FPS output with barely perceptible ghosting, only visible on Godrick's dragon-head arm during the breath attack
RTX 3050 mobile laptop, 1080p, mixed settings: capped native to 45 FPS, Fixed X2 landed close to 88–90 displayed FPS since frame gen itself ate some of the GPU budget on the same card
Steam Deck OLED, native SteamOS build: capped in-game to 40 FPS via the Deck's own frame limiter, applied Fixed X2 through Lossless Scaling's Linux-compatible frame gen, landed around 75–78 FPS

The laptop result is the one people underestimate. Running frame generation on the same GPU that's rendering the game always costs you some of the base rate, which is exactly why the dual-GPU trick exists for desktop users with a spare PCIe slot — a cheap secondary card can host Lossless Scaling's interpolation work while your main GPU renders Elden Ring at full native rate, avoiding the resource conflict of running both jobs on one card.

The Steam Deck numbers line up with what I found when tuning frame rates on Deck OLED for a different game — handhelds respond disproportionately well to frame gen because their APUs are power-limited, not raw-performance-limited.

Pro Tip: On a laptop with a discrete GPU and a decent integrated GPU (most recent Intel and AMD chips qualify), set the iGPU as your "Preferred GPU" inside Lossless Scaling instead of buying a second card. It won't match a dedicated secondary GPU's power, but it frees your discrete card entirely for Elden Ring's rendering, which is the single biggest performance lever on mobile hardware.

Where This Falls Apart (Honest Limitations)

Frame generation of any flavor doesn't fix a bad base frame rate. It amplifies whatever you're already feeding it.

If your native FPS is inconsistent — dropping into the 30s in Caelid's swamp fog, for example — LSFG will generate garbage interpolated frames from garbage source frames
Fast, high-contrast VFX like Malenia's Waterfowl Dance or big incantation spell effects confuse the optical flow model and produce visible smearing around the effect edges
HUD elements, especially the boss health bar and item pickup text, sometimes ghost slightly during camera pans, since the app can't distinguish UI layers from world geometry
Latency goes up, not down — even at Fixed X2 from a 60 FPS base you're adding somewhere in the 25–40ms range of input delay, which matters more in Elden Ring than in a slower single-player game because the parry and dodge windows are unforgiving
None of this fixes the shader-compilation stutter that hits when you enter a new area for the first time — that's an engine-level issue Lossless Scaling can't touch
Alt-tabbing out mid-session sometimes drops the frame gen overlay entirely, forcing you to reopen the app and re-scale rather than resuming automatically

If you're already fighting stutter for reasons unrelated to frame rate, it's worth ruling out other causes before blaming the frame generation layer. Background thermal throttling produces the same kind of inconsistent hitching, so it helps to know what causes GPU overheating before you spend an hour tweaking flow scale for nothing.

Common Mistakes That Wreck the Effect

Most of the "Lossless Scaling doesn't work" complaints I see trace back to one of these, not to the app itself.

Leaving Elden Ring in exclusive fullscreen instead of borderless windowed, which causes the capture layer to miss frames intermittently
Capping the base frame rate to an odd number relative to your monitor's refresh rate, like 50 FPS on a 144Hz panel — stick to clean divisors such as 60/120 or 48/144
Enabling both the in-game Elden Ring frame limiter and an external one like RTSS at the same time, which fights itself and produces micro-stutter that looks like a Lossless Scaling problem
Forgetting to disable Windows' Game Mode overlay conflicts, which occasionally steal the capture focus away from Lossless Scaling mid-session
Jumping straight to X3 or X4 multipliers on a 60 FPS base instead of confirming X2 feels clean first

Fix the frame-rate math before touching anything inside the app itself. Nine times out of ten that's the actual issue.

The Setup I'd Actually Recommend

Switch Elden Ring to Borderless Windowed mode in the in-game display settings
Cap your native frame rate to half your target output, using RTSS or the in-game frame limiter if one's available — 60 FPS native for a 120Hz target is the sweet spot
Open Lossless Scaling, set Scaling to "None" if you don't need upscaling on top of frame gen
Set Frame Generation to LSFG 3.1, Mode to Fixed X2
Set Resolution Scale to 100% unless you're GPU-bound, then drop toward 75%
Set Capture API to DXGI, with WGC as your fallback if the overlay stops detecting frames
Turn VSync on inside Lossless Scaling and match it to your monitor's max refresh rate
Launch Elden Ring first, then start scaling from the Lossless Scaling window once you're in a stable scene, not mid-loading-screen

Give it one full boss fight before you start tweaking further. A lot of people bail on frame gen after five seconds in a menu, where frame pacing always looks slightly off regardless of settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does using Lossless Scaling get you banned in Elden Ring? No — it operates outside the game process, capturing the finished frame rather than modifying game memory or files, which is a fundamentally different risk profile than an FPS-unlock mod that patches the executable.

What's the single best Lossless Scaling setting for Elden Ring? LSFG 3.1, Fixed X2, from a locked 60 FPS base with VSync on and DXGI capture — that combination held up best across every hardware tier I tested.

Why does Lossless Scaling stutter more than it should in Elden Ring? Usually an unstable base frame rate feeding the interpolation, or a G-Sync/VRR conflict — lock your refresh rate and cap your native FPS before touching any other setting.

Can I run Lossless Scaling on Steam Deck for Elden Ring? Yes, though SteamOS only exposes the frame generation half of the app, not the upscaling menu — cap your native rate around 30–40 FPS and apply Fixed X2 for a big jump in perceived smoothness without draining the battery as fast as a native 60 target would.

FromSoftware has never shown interest in bolting DLSS or FSR onto an already-shipped title, and there's no reason to expect Elden Ring Nightreign's engine improvements to retroactively fix the base game's cap. That leaves the community holding the wheel — a mix of Lossless Scaling for the low-effort route and OptiScaler-style injection for people chasing a cleaner frame-gen picture.

Given how much better LSFG 3.1 already feels compared to the version most guides still reference from 2024, the gap between "external overlay hack" and "feels like a native feature" keeps closing every time the app updates. My guess is the next real jump comes from handheld hardware makers baking frame-gen support closer to the OS layer, the way SteamOS already treats it as a first-class citizen for frame generation even without full upscaling support. Until then, a $7 app and ten minutes of settings tweaking is still the best return on effort in the entire PC gaming performance space.