If you’ve been sitting on the fence over Dark Souls Remastered, here’s a solid reason to pick a side: mid-range gaming PCs should have no trouble running the game at 1440p, and even 4K.
The latest tech analysis from Digital Foundry has broken down the Dark Souls remaster on PC and Xbox One X, although most of the focus centres on the PC port’s performance versus the original game with the DSFix.
Put simply, it’s wildly better. The original game ran relatively smoothly with a Ryzen 1700X and a GTX 1070, although there were a few drops if plenty of alpha effects were on the screen.
In the remaster? Crank it to 4K, and you’ll barely notice a drop. Even an i5-8400/GTX 1060 or RX 580 system can run the game at 1800p – the same resolution the Xbox One X plays Dark Souls Remastered at – and even 4K nicely, although in the latter you might want to drop the settings a touch to ensure no frame rate drops whatsoever.
What’s interesting is how much optimisation has gone into the single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. There’s still no unlocked frame rate option, but given that Dark Souls tied the game’s speed to frame rate, I’m not surprised it’s not included.
Beyond that, Dark Souls has been cleaned up a bit. It’s even better when you bugger motion blur off altogether and use a out-of-program sharpening filter. Now, if the developers could just fix the bonfire bug at Gwyndolin, that’d be great.
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