DSfix 1.1

This is a rather big one.

Bugfixes:

  • SSAO depth buffer inaccuracy fixed. Removes line artifacts from SSAO.
  • Added further renderpipeline state restoration after SMAA and checks whether we are at the correct stage. May (again) fix the SMAA issues some people are having.
  • Fixed windows scaling issue when toggling between borderless windowed fullscreen and windowed mode.

New features:

  • SSAO is now configurable in the .ini, with 3 strength presets (low, medium and high).
  • Optional high-quality DoF blur. This allows you to set the sharpness as intended while still maintaining very high DoF image quality.
  • And maybe the most requested one: HUD on/off toggle as bindable key action. Default is the right Ctrl key.

I’m a bit burnt out now after basically spending ~90% of my free time on this for almost 3 weeks. I’ll probably start getting the fix cleaned up for an open source release so that others can pick up the torch.

Here are 2 screenshots showing off what the game looks like now on a high-end system:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

As always, consider donating if you like the mod.

DSfix version 1.1 download

Please please remember to read the README.txt!

Don’t set your DoF resolution to the same as your vertical rendering resolution, set it LOWER than that. Same or higher doesn’t make sense and is wrong and you shouldn’t do it and it will cause problems.

170 thoughts on “DSfix 1.1

  1. SMAO at the higher settings seems to cause a ‘black aura’ effect around edges, it’s particularly noticable around the feet of your character on bright backgrounds (think Anor Londo) and straight corners like on the treasure chests. I don’t seem to notice it when set to 1, so i’m going to test the mid setting now and see what that looks like. full on definitely makes it noticable.

    • seems to be a good shading effect in most places. do kind of notice it following as an “aura” effect though sometimes. a “Dark aura”.

  2. I got the fix going but for the sake of me I cannot disable the black borders you ger around the screen in fullscreen mode, can anybody lend a hand here?

  3. I just mentiont some problem that may be caused by language changer. I use it to get my game running on EN instead of RU. And i find that with this i can’t switch language in Steam chat anymore, it’s EN only now. It isn’t a problem, i just can change my win settings. Maby you can fix this in the future.

    And thank you very very much for everything you done to DS community.

  4. My rendering resolution is 2560×1440; my monitor resolution is 1920×1080. I have set DoF to 1080, which is lower than the rendering resolution, as you mentioned. Is that correct?

    • Yes, that’s fine. Your monitor’s resolution doesn’t really factor into anything until the final scaling step.

  5. “1-2 above that”

    What do you mean by that? Should i put 2 or 1-2 as the setting? Running 1440 dof on 1920 resolution.

      • Thank you. It seems 1 looks better, lets a little more detail show in the dof effect. One more question, what setting for smaa do you recommend? They all show the same performance for me, i dont want slowdowns when things get hectic though, it happens regardless of youre settings with this game, but i want to keep it to a minimum which is why im asking.

        Thanks for everything youre doing man, you saved the pc release.

        • Edit: I actually took screenshots of both and cant tell the difference in the dof, what is it?

  6. The new blurring feature looks awesome, but I’m having some issues with SMAA and SSAO. SMAA doesn’t seem to work at all. Toggling it (Yes, I’ve removed the # from the line in the keys ini) doesn’t make any discernible difference, however using the injector on top of DSFix works fine. As for SSAO, It really screws up the grass (An excellent example is the grass around firelink) and causes strange striping on the edge of objects (square pillars for example). I don’t recall having this issue in 1.0 (The SMAA didn’t work in 1.0 either though). Any advice? Thanks.

    • It seems like you could have the rare issue where the correct rendering step for effect injection isn’t found. I have yet to determine what causes that.

      • Ah okay. I’ll keep using the SMAA injector in the mean while. As for the SSAO, hopefully you can improve that in later builds. Thanks for all the hard work :)

  7. Thanks for your hard work! You made playing the PC version of Dark Souls completely worth it!

    Now, if only I could get the summoning to work on PC…it’s like pre-1.05 all over again!

      • I had the same issue. Unhollowed, I kept getting invaded, but could not summon or be summoned. I set up DMZ to my computer on my WLAN, and I now have no issues at all. Look into port forwarding to solve these issues. I think it’s that GFWL is particularly picky.

    • This happened to me when I doubled my native resolution and used supersampling. If you set the resolution to your actual resolution (mine would be 1600 x 900 for example) then that won’t happen. At least it doesn’t for me.

  8. I have tried several setting combinations and i can’t get rid off a flickering effect in the distance. My Graphics Card is AMD Radeon 6700. Interestingly it is running much smoother than before.

    I’ll keep using 0.9.1 for now.

  9. Hey durante thanks so much for what you have done till date! It has made dark souls much better to play! Though with this dsfix 1.1 SSAO and SMAA are not working for me anymore even though they worked in dsfix 1.0 just a heads up on this peculiar problem that some of us seem to face. Does it have to do with the installation drive being at D instead of C?

  10. Hey I’m having a problem with the resolution… The menus look fine, but as soon as I’m ingame, the screen doesn’t stretch to fit my monitor, also screenshots aren’t working :/. So basically… I get ingame, and the screen looks like a 4inch by 4inch box in the upper right hand corner…

  11. can i use msaa with ssao and gauss i know you cant use ssma at the same time need to know because i use 3d vision and was told i cant ss by downscaling in 3d so i want best IQ possible

    And thanks for working so hard the mod is amazing

  12. SMAA doesn’t seem to be working right for me… at least when comparing the Injector Ultra profile version vs Dsfix Ultra profile.

    DSfix SMAA Ultra: http://u3767.direct.atpic.com/25285/vrnqrrqrfwwmdziuqgoj/2560448/0.jpg

    SMAAinjector 1.2: http://u3767.direct.atpic.com/25285/vrnqrrqrfwwmdziuqgoj/2560449/0.jpg

    When I toggle SMAA on and off in DSfix the stair step pattern very very slightly changes but doesn’t produce the results like the stand alone injector.

  13. With this update as well as the last few, I delete the previous mod that I installed of yours(0.7 I believe), and install this one, then adjust the settings in the ini to my preferences, but when I click Play in Steam, it says Dark Souls has stopped working. Yes, I’ve disabled motion blur and the aa in game. Any help would be appreciated! Oh, btw, VERY nice work you’ve done with this mod Durante!

  14. White screen after havok logo , dont work, any solution for this ?
    i play on GTX 480 athlon x4 640 ram 8Gb ddr3 1333…

  15. Is a mod for more than 30fps ever going to be feasible? I’m not asking if you’re going to do it, Durante, but maybe when it’s open source do you think it’ll ever be possible?

  16. Thx for your spare time that made the game much more fun for so many poeple. Hard to find a thread about the PC-port that doenst mind your fix. Great work.

  17. Great fix! but i was wondering if anybody else has this problem, i connected a normal PC Controller and everything works great except the right analog stick, when i put it to the right the camera goes up, when i put it up the camera goes right
    when i put it left the camera goes down and when it down the camera goes left, its very weird.

    • Use Motionjoy or the Xbox 360 controller emulator to config your gamepad correctly. I had the same issue using my ps 3 pad first. Using one of these tools fixes it

  18. Oh and i forgot to say that i can’t skip the intro logos even i change the value by 1 ^^
    (sorry for double posting but i can’t edit.)

  19. Did you have been contacted by From or Namco Bandai about your mod? Beside the fact that they should be grateful to you they didn’t address a word to the community since the launch?

    Thanks for you hard work anyway :)

  20. Thank you very much for this patch, it work really good but i have some problems with the DSfix.ini : for exemple, i make all options for best performance and i can’t go to more than 12 fps, and i have a geforce 650M , so my pc is not the problem i guess :s So i would know if it is possible to make a tutorial to configurate the DSfix.ini ?
    And i have one question more : i don’t understand what the mouse fix is and how can i have it? it would be cool for a best camera ^^
    ty for listening.

    ps: I’m sorry for the english but i’m french so i hope you understand all ^^

  21. Could you look into fixing visible “A” and “B” buttons while HUDless mode? It would be so cool sitting by bonfire without them on the screen

  22. Can you provide the settings you were using in the screenshots that you provided? No matter how I tweak the settings, something always looks at least a little blurry.

    For example, in your second screenshot, the taller grass looks really crisp. Always looks blurry for me.

    • 3072×2160 rendering resolution
      SMAA high
      VSSAO on, medium strength
      2160 DoF with 3 extra gauss passes

      • Hi, there Peter,
        Great work so far! I hope you get some “real” recognition with this from the big sharks =)
        Just one thing:
        You said DoF shouldn’t be the same as vertical parameter in resolution but on this case, those amazing pictures apparently are:
        -3072×2160 rendering resolution
        -2160 DoF with 3 extra gauss passes

        Should this be avoided?

        • That’s unfortunate, but true. it works because the rendering resolution is not 16:9, so it’s not exactly the same as the DoF resolution. Good catch!

  23. Is there a way to disable SSAO from drawing in the distance as the previous version did in order to avoid pixellation around distant objects?

    Thanks for all your work :)

  24. Thanks!

    But for the first time in all your fixes, I am having some problems. The toggle keys don’t seem to be doing anything…probably something on my end that I’ll have to check out later.

  25. Hi!
    Love your work, fantastic job you have done!

    Only 1 thing, you have forgotten, to put the readme.txt in your zip file.. xD

    Good luck 4 future works

  26. first of all i want to thank you, really nice mod!

    but i found a bug (maybe), the DoF Blur is also bluring the menu and loading screens

    • Hmm, this doesn’t happen for me.

      Edit: see above. You are not supposed to select the same DoF and rendering resolution!

  27. Has anyone got a comparison screenshot for the new DoF setting? I don’t understand peter’s explanation, I think.

    • Okay, nevermind. Just started up the game, it’s VERY noticeable. I love you, Peter.

      Now if only someone could fix the occassional drops to 15 fps after you’ve released the source code, this game would be complete.

  28. *******IMPORTANT*******

    If you are using this new version with the dll version of the mouse fix (located here: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~petska/), be sure to open up the DSfixKeys.ini and set the toggleCursorVisibility key back to F9 (or anything but F7). The new default is F7, which is the same key used to turn on/off the mouse fix! What this means is, turning off the mouse cursor will also turn off the mouse fix unless you change the key to something besides F7.

    Also, the NUMPAD keys used to mess with DSFix’s SSAO and SSAA effects also turn up and down the sensitivity/dead zone in the Mouse Fix as well, so I recommend changing those in the DSfixKeys.ini as well.

    • UPDATE – For the NUMPAD things, the only two you need to change in the DSfixKeys.ini are the lines that say “#toggleDofGauss VK_NUMPAD3″ – change the 3 to 4 – and “#reloadHUDVertices VK_NUMPAD9″ – change the 9 to 0 – and that’s it. The dsmfix (mouse fix) uses NUMPAD + and – to adjust sensitivity, and NUMPAD 9 and 3 to adjust the deadzone.

      So basically, if you are using the mouse fix alongside this new version of Durante’s fix, change the following in DSfixKeys.ini:

      toggleCursorVisibility VK_F7 – Change F7 to F9 (or anything but F7)

      #toggleDofGauss VK_NUMPAD3 – Change 3 to 4 (or anything but 3)

      #reloadHUDVertices VK_NUMPAD9 – Change 9 to 0 (or anything but 9)

      Doing this will make it so that the mouse fix and Durante’s fix don’t share keys, causing you to turn off some effects when messing with others and so forth.

      • When there is a “#” in front of a line it’s ignored. The toggles are not enabled by default.

        • That wasn’t important, I was simply c&ping the line with the value that they needed to change, so that they could find it in the ini easier.

          • Oh wait I know what you mean. Erasing the actual # sign enables the toggles – gotcha.

            Either way though they need to change them to avoid shared keys between the two fixes – that’s pretty much all I was trying to point out.

  29. With SSAO set to medium, I’m getting some crazy flickering on the tall grass around Firelink Shrine’s bonfire. Is that the expected behavior or am I doing someting wrong?

    • I also get this, even set to high – and the shadows on the grass look REALLY pixelated as well. There is also a black outline around everything.

      DoF reso is set to 540 and the DoF quality set to 1 (which it says to set it to if you use 540). This combined with the SSAO creates small black squares everywhere on anything that is in the DOF range, such as the tree if you look up at it in Firelink.

    • You are doing something wrong. Maybe you didn’t extract VSSAO.fx or vssaothicknessmodel.png from the zip correctly?

      • I put everything from inside the zip directly into the DATA folder, the same way you had it inside the zip. Nothing else was changed.

        DSfix folder went in, the dll went in, and the ini went in.

        • The only thing I left out was the VERSIONS and README texts.

          dsfix (folder)
          DINPUT8.dll
          DSfix.ini
          DSfixKeys.ini

          Those all went into the DATA folder as is, just like every other version. The SSAO effect is..iffy. It looks fine with it off.

          The only thing I can think of is a graphics card issue – my comp handles it in every other game (Ambient Occlusion that is) but I guess it doesn’t like it in DkS without creating artifacts and/or pixels.

          • strangely, try deleting the files then putting them back in. seems like that fixed something for me on one of the updates. try deleting the.log file as well.

  30. Just a small error report. in the dsfix.ini file, you still say cursor visibility is f9, while in the key bindings its set at f7.

  31. SSAO is behaving oddly for me. While the previous line artifacts are gone, I’m getting this instead: http://bit.ly/QsWn3s
    I fiddled with the other settings (DoF, blur, SSAO strength) and I’m getting the same results.

    SMAA still isn’t working for me unless I use a separate SMAA injector to use along with DSFix.

    • If SMAA isn’t working SSAO also won’t work.

      The mod is not detecting to correct place in the renderpipeline to inject the modifications. I don’t know why this happens.

      Could it be that you have motion blur disabled?

    • its rendering the SSAO at the set game rendering resolution and not your native resolution.

      basically you need to set your rendering res the same as your native or screen resolution and it should fix it. (is that dsfix ssao or nvidia? because dsfix has never had that prob for me only nvidia)

      • actually after a second look things seemed to be lined up in your screens. erm.. if youve got it set to your native res and its still doing that try turning off AA? Or checking your nvidia profile (if your using one)

        Seems like those lines became visible when i had AA turned on in one of the earlier patches . Which is how i noticed it wasnt lined up and adjusted my res to fix it.

  32. Like the rest i would like to thank you for the amazing work :D and suggest that you just take a rest and relax, clear your mind!!!

  33. Great work!

    Your Achievements with DSFix 1.01:
    - No more BMP screenshots are created automatically in the background on WinXPSP3.
    - No more lag in the menu that possibly reduced framerate as well.
    - ALT+TAB is working perfectly. Turning off SMAA and playing in higher resolution gives fluid framerate at around 30fps, while looking great. This is important for fast smooth battles.
    - Dark Souls Mouse Fix can be chained and works perfectly well with your DSFix and gives super-smooth camera control with kb+mouse.

    You definitely deserve donations!

    Thank You for your professional work!

  34. Not to nitpick but seems like when setting SSAO to 3 it still gets the thick extra black lines everywhere. Doesn’t go well with the volumetric fog. :(

    Also when I set dof to 1080 the new gaussian blur no longer works and the load menus and such are all blurred.

    • You should never set DoF resolution to the same thing as rendering resolution. It’s wrong and will cause errors.

      Also, SSAO 3 is supposed to be strong. If you want a more subdued effect chose 1 or 2.

  35. Thanks for hard work Peter,I look after since you release first version,rest in fame.
    Is there much to improve on?I mean like adding DX10 support.(for (far)further future)

      • Thanks for all the work so far. Now the game looks superb! It works playable even with SSAO on my GTX260. First time I can play something with SSAO. I would add to that list the inmediate fullscreen or minimizing of the misplaced window that appears on the game loading, though.

        Thanks very much again!!

  36. Thank you for making Dark Souls PC all that I hoped for when it was first announced. I’m gonna donate as soon as I get my salary at the end of the month.

  37. I’d like to thank you very much for your effort and work you put in this. I hope that you get the recognition you deserve for making this fix. Thank you very much again.

  38. I love this fix/mod! You’ve made this game a lot better. I really hope after you take a break to keep developing it, im sure we all donate more money!

  39. Hello Durante

    Thank you for everything you have done with this fix. You have made this version of dark souls so much better than it was on release.

    I am enjoying higher resolution, ssao, smaa, skipped intro, automatic backing up of saves etc.

    Once again, thank you so much for everything!

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