Dark Souls: Remastered PC Performance Review

Screenshots

The main selling points of Dark Souls: Remastered is its higher framerate and higher gameplay resolution, offering a minimal increase in graphical fidelity over the game’s original PC release.

A lot of Dark Souls’ artwork translates well to higher resolutions, with some details benefiting greatly from the increase in pixel detail. Sadly, this is not the case for everything, especially as pixel counts creep higher, with gaps transparent appearing between level geometry and distant textures and environments looking muddy and boxy. 

As a “Remaster”, some players will be disappointed that many of Dark Souls’ textures have not received a touch-up and that distant geometric details have not become more complex. This lack of visual improvement is why many people argue that this release of Dark Souls is more of a “patch” than a remaster.  

  
  

Even at a game resolution of 4K, VRAM usage remained below 2GB, showing us that QLOC could have pushed Dark Souls’ textures too much higher resolutions if they were willing to invest in higher quality artwork.

On the upside, this means that users of older graphics hardware should not worry about VRAM capacity becoming a limiting factor, though it does leave us thinking that Dark Souls: Remastered could have pushed the graphical envelope a lot further.   

  
  

Something that we would have loved to see in this remaster is an internal resolution scaling option, where players could choose to use a form of supersampling within the game if they desired it. Thankfully similar options are available within both Nvidia and AMD’s graphics drivers, though an integrated option would have been preferable. Anisotropic filtering options would have also been a neat addition, though again this option can be forced using both AMD and Nvidia’s graphics drivers.