Dark Souls III PC Port Analysis

Peter “Durante” Thoman,the author of the famous DSFix mod for the original Dark Souls and frequent contributor for PC Gamer, has extensively analyzed the PC version of Dark Souls III on the publication’s pages.

The results are satisfactory, though he notes that the port is particularly CPU-hungry and that maintaining a consistent 60fps framerate might be difficult and that only a handful of graphic options have a truly noticeable impact on visual quality and performance. In better news, though, all bugs that were linked with higher framerates in the previous titles seem to have been fixed.

I recommend reading the full article for detailed breakdowns on CPU and GPU usage, framerate and graphic options, among other things, but here are a couple of interesting quotes that I’d like to highlight:

To start things off, I decided to spend some time checking up on the basic features I consider essential. Dark Souls 3 supports arbitrary resolutions (tested up to 5120×2880) and variable frame rates up to 60 FPS.

The latter was also true for Dark Souls 2, but there was an issue: weapon degradation speed was tied to framerate. While it seemed unlikely for the same mistake to occur again, I still decided to spend some time hitting a wall with a sword a specific number of times. The results showed identical weapon degradation, but I can tell you that even hitting a wall felt better at 60 FPS.

Still not fully satisfied, I recalled that anunlocked framerate affected rolling distance in Dark Souls 1 and performed some further tests. The image below is an overlay of 6 separate rolling attempts from the same starting point, 3 at 30 FPS and 3 at 60 FPS, with the camera aligned. As you can see, I’m not perfect in angling my rolls or pressing the roll button on the exact same frame, but there is absolutely no visible trend indicating a framerate dependency in the length of the roll.

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Controls are very similar to Dark Souls 2, which means support for Xinput-compatible gamepads as well as decent mouse and keyboard options that are fully reconfigurable from within the game. For owners of a Steam controller, it should be noted that mouse and controller inputs are recognized at the same time, allowing for precise mouse camera controls while keeping all other actions bound to their default gamepad buttons.

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Dark Souls 3’s day-and-date PC release is a very competent version of the game. It loads lightning fast, allows for arbitrary resolutions and runs at variable framerates up to 60 FPS, without any framerate-dependent gameplay effects I could identify. While it demands more in terms of CPU and GPU than its predecessor, this increase in requirements is commensurate with the increase in overall graphical fidelity in most areas of the game at least, a few clearly suffer from performance issues. Generally, asset quality and detail is significantly improved, and the in-game AA and SSAO are of a quality which obviates the need for external injection.