Dark Souls internal rendering resolution fix

I’ll add more internal details here soon.

Check out a general overview at GAF.

Also, this is the donation link in case you want to donate.

Download Link

Important: turn off in-game AA (blur filter)

 

Known Issues

  • Message text is not rendered correctly. I will work on this tomorrow.
  • Does not work with the in-game AA (but that’s just a blur filter anyway)
  • Bad framerate reported on AMD cards, NV seems fine

 

209 thoughts on “Dark Souls internal rendering resolution fix

  1. @Mithrot:
    From software makes fantastic games, not so great ports.
    Namco-Bandai has done well to recognize the potential of this game on PC, but should have spent the paltry sum of money required to make this an acceptable port.

    @kockamester:
    Soon.

    • >to make this an acceptable port.

      Thats…debatable. That aside, what are your goals for the future of the fix, perhaps even contacting Namco to make it official?

      • If they wanted to do it, they could without my help. It would be even simpler for them than it was for me (they don’t need to intercept their own calls ;) )

        • Wow, you actually had to dissemble and find the specific calls to the resolution? Props for being so quick mate, obviously got some great talent.

          • Well, how did you think he did it? If you know enough about the renderer which is used then it’s quite doable. Still, big props to this guy for making it this quick without any internal knowledge – that’s quite good.

  2. Pingback: Dark Souls - PC - Sayfa 3

      • I wonder why, LA Noire and Alice: Madness Returns had removable FPS caps. Alice was due to Unreal Engine but still, there has got to be a way to remove cap

          • In theory it’s not that hard to allow at least integer multiples of 30 FPS and just 60 FPS would already be MUCH better.
            Most games have a main loop that calls the different routines responsible for updating the physics, doing the networking, rendering the view etc.
            You can reverse engineer the game to find this main loop (break randomly and observe the function trace). Finding the FPS cap itself shouldn’t be too hard either (e.g. you could search for string references in the context of the function that drops you to the main menu when your FPS drops below 30). Now all you have to do is double the FPS cap and in the main loop you do everything but the view rendering only on every second call.
            Now, of course, I don’t know the internal workings of the engine but the fact that they couldn’t do it really proves nothing. I mean, seriously, any half-decent programmer could have done this kind of resolution fix within like five minutes with access to the source code.
            No, they obviously didn’t even try to make this port half decent, which is pretty lame.

  3. Pingback: Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition - [ PREVIEW ]

  4. Pingback: Dark Souls Resolutuion Mod | truepcgaming

  5. Can i have your babies ? ! xD..
    But jokes aside cant wait till you release this fine peace of homebrewn dll :)

  6. Thanks for looking at this. I’m glad to see it’s coming together and improving upon what From Software has done. Let’s remember guys, this is their first in-house port (Ninja Blade was not fully FS’ own work) and supporting them here is the first HUGE step into getting their unique designs on the PC!

  7. Mate,

    I just wanted to say thank you. Not only for your work on this but how you have handled it. The post you have made about not disrespecting a team that has never worked on PC games before to provide a port only because people asked for it is sheer amazing.

    There are a lot of devs out there that when they do something great there ego flys out the door.

    Very refreshing to see someone like you.

    Thank you again <3

  8. For shit and jiggles, I tested it on NFS Underground and guess what.
    It worked.
    I don’t have Dark Souls yet, but, hell. This works really good! Thanks mate!

  9. Had this on console, and am wondering if in certain parts of the game this fix will dump my fps down to shit? If I start the game with your fix, is it possible or will it hurt anything to just remove the files if anything goes wrong and continue playing where I am at??

  10. Well. Doesn’t work for me. I have many afrtifacts. But rendere has been changed. I noticed that.

    Operating System Version:
    Windows 7 (32 bit)

    Video Card:
    Driver: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
    Driver Version: 9.18.13.567
    Driver Date: 8 Aug 2012

  11. Pingback: Unofficial Patch Frees Dark Souls PC of Resolution Limits - eXophase.com

  12. Hey Durante,

    Us guys over at alphaoptix noticed on the forums that you’re not sure if this site can handle the demand for the download. We hosted it for you at http://www.darksoulsdb.com/DSfix.zip and you can use that as a mirror or main dl if you want. If you are interested in hosting it, send me an e-mail and we can get you FTP access to handle updates to it or whatever you want.

    Cheers,
    -B

  13. Doesn’t work for me. The UI works but I get a large grey box in the top left hand corner of the screen (behind the humanity count/HP bars). thanks for your effort/work though.

  14. Now it works when I disabled in-game AA and holy shit is this glorious. If I wasn’t so fucking poor I’d donate to your cause. Thanks very much for this.

  15. Hi, thx for it. There’s a bug though, some texts have disappear (hints/message and when you press start for example). Didn’t try in english, maybe this has something to do with multilanguage?

  16. Pingback: Anonymous

  17. You wonderful man. Thank you for doing this. I love From for releasing this for PC and I’m glad people like you are making modifications like this

  18. Any chance of this working or a mod for AMD cards? I would gladly donate if you got that working so I don’t have to buy an Nvidia card just for Dark Souls (I’m seriously thinking about it).

  19. Didn’t work for me. It made screen partially gray, partially black. Running on Phenom II X6, 580GTX (301.42 WHQL drivers), Win7 x64. Tried on Samsung 226BW 1680×1050 and 1680×945 both full- and non-fullscreen, both didn’t work.

  20. Looks great and works great so far! Love it! Thank you very much!

    One problem though, text messages don’t show text. It’s just an empty black box. Not a big issue, but hoping it can be fixed

  21. Pingback: Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition – NeoGAFer ‘Durante’ to the rescue – Resolution Fix Released | DSOGaming | The Dark Side Of Gaming

  22. I’m running it on an HD5850 and it’s been a consistent 30fps even in blighttown and during queelag. Maybe my cpu is picking up slack.

  23. Okay.. The game is loading forever. Not sure what’s up with that. And it is windowed. Hmmm…

  24. Game crashed (stopped responding error) right when it starts up :(
    I’ve made sure AA/blur are turned off.

    Please help! My friend got his working and its working beautifully. I am jealous!

    Windows 7
    Ati 5850

  25. Durante, i find out that to read ingame messages vertical resolution must be 720. 1920 horizontal is fine.

    • This happens because the game is capped at 720p, so the resolution you posted is the default, this tweak is to enable bigger resolutions!

      • never mind, he’s right, just tested, renderWidth 1920
        renderHeight 720, displays at 1080p and messages show fine.

  26. Thanks for this! Another unfortunate problem right now is it prevents nVidia 3D vision from working.

    • This happend to me as well. I was running MSI Afterburner so I would have the on-screen FPS and temps. When I closed Afterburner the mod started to work and no more crash at start-up.

  27. Will this work with 16:10 resolutions? setting it to 1440×900 makes it start out of fullscreen and won’t go into fullscreen resolution(highest is 1440×840 listed). not sure what the deal is.

    • So the game displays at my native res(1440×900) just fine, however with your texture upscaling hack It won’t run in fullscreen at a resolution higher than 1380×760. Weird!

  28. I’m assuming this an Nvidia Optimus issue, but the game won’t recognize my dedicated graphics when I stick the fix in the game’s steam directory. Without, it recognizes it fine. The fix DOES work with the integrated graphics though.

    • Interesting. Does it still run in full screen or is it forced to windowed? If the latter, I’ll fix that next release.

      • Just tried it again. No forcing to window, but no change either. Checked my whitelists too. Not sure what’s up.

      • Yeah this is a problem with Optimus, it won’t allow any sort of .dll interception without switching the game to the awful Intel onboard graphics. The only way around this is to use an injector, like ENB series does for skyrim.

        If you can eventually sort that out it would make a ton of laptop users happy. Including me! (that would be entirely donation worthy too)

  29. Wow! I can’t believe how much better the game looks after this little mod. If you can manage to fix the message display bug I’ll gladly donate a few bucks. Thanks so much for your time spent on this, very appreciated.

      • xvid

        Yes I tried your above suggestion, and putting the height at 720 pixels does solve the text issue. However it also changes the internal rendering resolution to an odd aspect ratio, causing aliasing (not to mention a less detail than 1080p).

        I was reading the steam forum about this mod, and somebody suggested upping the resolution above your display’s native resolution for super sample anti-aliasing. This works very well, but it was too slow on my computer at 3840×2160 (I have a GTX 465 / i5 750 rig.)

        So I thought maybe if you ran the internal resolution at 1440p so it was exactly 2x the game’s regular resolution maybe the text would line up and be readable. Unfortunately the text is still gone, but the performance is still excellent and it looks amazing.

        Long story short, the text thing is still an issue but this mod is even better than I thought. If that problem is fixed I will be thrilled.

  30. Is there any hope of seeing a mod to change on the on screen prompts to show the keyboard keys. It’s incredibly difficult remembering what keys to press.

  31. Thanks for this ^^
    Just wanted to report another bug:
    The Game crashes while starting when the programm: “EVGA Precision X” (latest version) is runing

  32. HELP! I’m using a Gtx 460 1gb, amd athlon x4 @ 3.1 ghz, and 4 gb of RAM and im getting major lag in-game!! I rarely get 30 fps and am usually at 15-25 with lag spikes to lower fps! WTH why did they lie about the system requirements!? Someone have a fix? People with similar setups seem to be doing just fine WTF?!

  33. xid on 2012-08-24 at 02:50 said:
    Durante, i find out that to read ingame messages vertical resolution must be 720. 1920 horizontal is fine.

    Yep also works here setting the resolution in dsfix.ini to 1920×720 brings back me text.

  34. Pingback: Dark Souls fan offers unofficial resolution mod | VG247

  35. Could you please tell me if this will work with nvidia optimus? When placing d3d9.dll files in skyrim game folders it makes optimus not work and tries to use the integrated intel graphics. My fear is that this will do the same. Can anyone confirm that this will work with optimus?

    • yeah i have the same problem. GTX 670. Game crashes to desktop with and without the patch

      • Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Nvidia eVGA 480GTX superclocked.

        Game doesn’t crash, but 3d visuals don’t display at all.
        The screen is black with a light grey rectangle occupying about 1/3 of the screen in the upper left corner.

        The 2d overlays, menu’s etc are fine and working. Gameplay seems to be fine as I can hear the sounds respond to my controls, but all I see is that grey rectangle :(

  36. Pingback: Dark Souls fan offers unofficial resolution mod | Gaming R.S.S.

  37. when i want to play i got this :D ark Souls Prepare To Die Edition stop working
    my lcd res is 1360×768, can you help me plz cause i really wanna play this game

  38. Pingback: Dark Souls fan offers unofficial resolution mod | GameBooze – Bottoms up! Aggregated gaming news, guides, cheats and fixes to quench your gaming needs.

  39. After I editted the file, live wont connect me for some reason. Im trying to delete all the files that got updated. After I transferred your two files over other files showed up? I dont know which ones to delete now??

  40. Great mod, I can’t believe that you managed to get it up so quickly. The difference is astounding. I know that it is already a known issue, but I am having significant slowdown, even with very little on screen. I’m using a an AMD Radeon HD 6770M. Thanks again and keep up the good work!

  41. A great mod, really makes the graphics what they should be.

    One bug for me is that I cannot see ANY UI except the menu (when pressing END).

    AMD 4890HD, Q9400 Quad Core

    Runs great otherwise!

  42. What is up with the controls? I wish they put a little bit of effort into making the PC more easy to figure out, A B START? I WANT TO KNOW WHICH KEYS DO WHICH

  43. Pingback: Dark Souls voor PC beter met onofficiele fix • Duimschroef

  44. Pingback: Dark Souls PC Resolution Fix and New Trailer | SegmentNext

  45. Pingback: Dark Souls on PC looks awful, but a fix is at hand « Player Attack

  46. Expect money coming your way from me. You have done a great service and deserve life’s finest

  47. I have a really weird problem. When I put the files in the file where dark souls.exe is in, darksouls just appears on 1/4 of the screen in the left corner. The hud stays normal tough.

  48. Pingback: IndianVideoGamer | Video Game News, Video Game Reviews, Indian Video Games | » Dark Souls PC gets third party resolution fix

  49. when ill use fix , ill cant read the help mesages on the grounds, its just a free space. In inventory (and other)screen, press buttons(like A:equip) will not display too. BTW thnx for the fix, ill hope devs can fix it with patches later…

  50. the only problem is the test,i can’t see them,for the rest great job

    Now the game shows its muscles and that’s only because of you

  51. Tried to run on My Alienware I-7 3.4GHZ, 16GB Ram, Crossfire 6970′s system….game will not load. Have to completely delete game and re-download :(

    Great looking screens. Hope you can get this to work. If not, I’ll just keep playing. Fell in love with this game last October. Nothing has come close in 10 years.

  52. Thank you so much!! You just made playing this game 100x more enjoyable. I hope you can do this for a living and maybe get hired from a big company to improve their games! :)

  53. Pingback: Dark Souls уже вышел на ПК со странными техническими проблемами, и вот как их можно починить | pressxtowin.com

  54. Pingback: Someone’s already modded custom resolutions into Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition « BeefJack - The Gamer's Sauce

  55. Nice work man, is it possible to set the refresh rate in the .ini to 120hz as the game is locked to 59/60hz?

  56. Pingback: Fan-Mod für Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition erhöht die Bildschirmauflösung

  57. Pingback: Dark Souls PC Crashes, Low FPS Fix, Controls, Errors, Freezes and GFWL Fixes | SegmentNext

  58. text in resolution 1920×1080 working just fine on mine! dont play with mouse/keyboard. use xbox controller emulator and play on pad. way better experience

  59. Awesome work!

    Now I have another problem. It seems that the game limits FPS on 15 and 30. Is there a way to break the limit?

  60. Pingback: Dark Souls internal rendering resolution fix | metaclassofnilblog | Mój blog

  61. I keep getting this error when i try to run the game with the files.

    APPCRASH
    Application Name: DATA.exe
    Application Version: 1.0.0.1
    Application Timestamp: 50090197
    Fault Module Name: StackHash_0a9e
    Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
    Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
    Exception Code: c0000005
    Exception Offset: 9e7058f0
    OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
    Locale ID: 2057
    Additional Information 1: 0a9e
    Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
    Additional Information 3: 0a9e
    Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

  62. Pingback: Blogme » Dark Souls internal rendering resolution fix | metaclassofnilblog

  63. Hey all
    Bit off topic but am frustrated as hell. Last few days my games and any other full screen apps keep minimizing randomly. i recently got a new monitor dell u2312hm.
    system specs: AMD phenom x4 975
    radeon 6850
    jigsaw 8gb ram

    Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks justin

  64. Pingback: Dark Souls mod fixes Prepare to Die edition resolution problems | AXE TİCARET

  65. i ran the new mod but it is only playing in the top right corner of my screen looks in full res but it only 6 by 5 inches big?

  66. Pingback: Dark Souls PC modder ups the resolution | SlappersOnly

  67. My monitor is 1920X1080 native. Is it okay to set a higher resolution? I am not sure what the difference between internal resolution and display resolution is. Thanks!

    my pc specs: core i7 3770 , 560ti . . .

  68. Good job man. Took me some time to get the game working with and without the fix.
    If you are having issues with game crashing with this fix or without:
    1. Make sure you disable any kind of FPS/GPU monitors you have (EVGA Precision for example).
    2. Make sure you run the game as administrator.
    3. In the Ds Fix file change logLevel 1 to logLevel 0

  69. Dark Souls on PC is a double edged sword IMO. We can probably all agree that this port is a horrendous piece of crap but at least it’s on PC now. I have had fun even though I really miss the mouse looking since I have to use controller. But we need to support these guys now so that they might in the future actually employ some guys that actually know something about PC platform because let’s face it, the From guys clearly don’t :)

  70. Really thanks for this patch.

    Can you make optimization patch?
    I really need it…
    I cannot play darksouls because of bad optimization of fromsoftware.
    Hope for optimization patch..:-)

  71. I am playing on a crossfire HD6950 setup and have not experienced any sort of performance drops (also I am playing in 1440p). I just rang the first bell in game and so far so good as far as no problems with my AMD cards.

    • Crossfire HD7970 here and the game is running great at 2560×1600. I thought the locked 30 FPS would bother me, but it really isn’t noticeable once you get into the game for an extended period. It is really quite amazing how good the game looks with anisotropic filtering and aa forced from ccc.

  72. Pingback: Un fan arregla el problema de resolución de Dark Souls para PC « Barrio Gamer

  73. Pingback: Un fan creó un mod para solucionar el problema de resolución de Dark Souls en PC | Atomix

  74. Pingback: Modder Gives Dark Souls PC An Upgrade | MensaDad News

  75. Pingback: Dark Souls PC Edition Gets Day 1 Mod - OWNT

  76. i have nvidia optimus my card is geforce gt 555m, im able to play max payne 3 and battlefield 3 in high settings, but this game is running slow, and with this dll, the quality of the graphics stays very good, but the fps of the game drops a lot and is impossible to play, ther is a solution for this problem?

  77. Thanks for this!

    Any word on how to get text to appear on higher resolutions? always completely blank for me (no cut offs or anything)

  78. Pingback: Dark souls - Page 3

  79. Pingback: Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition Fan Mod Fixes Resolution | TechnoBuffalo

  80. Pingback: Latest Technology News » Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition Fan Mod Fixes Resolution

  81. Hey I have an issue, with and without this mod, my game gets terrible framerate, and crashes a LOT, about every 10 minutes. my computer is good enough to run it i know that, i can run crysis on this thing just fine. i just need help on how i can optimize my computer or what i can do to help. i thought this mod may, but it really changes nothing.

  82. Pingback: Fansen fixar Dark Souls PC-grafik » KATHING

  83. to author:
    I recommend to make injector like i did, this will allow to fix issues with software like Afterburn, EVGA, XFire, D3D Overrider and performance on laptops with NVidia Optimus.

  84. Pingback: 23 Minutes After Release, Modder Fixes Dark Souls PC Port |Trax Asia™

  85. With or without the patch the game sometimes switches to desktop if I am running and swing a weapon at the same time. It doesn’t crash, and I can return to the game, but of course I have lost half of my health by that point.

    Anybody else noticed this? It makes the game quite unplayable. Windows 7 64 bit, quad core, nvidia card.

  86. Pingback: Dark Souls tendrá un parche con texturas HD

  87. So while trying to copy into game it says im short 370 Kb’s? im trying to delete something in my file but it wont let me am I the only one with this problem?

  88. Hey,
    When i went to start the game the second time after installing the fix I received an error message that said “cannot launch application running” upon investigation I found the Dsfix text doc had never stopped running. I can’t seem to turn it off and have tried restarting my comp. Anybody know how to fix this/

  89. Pingback: [RS+4] Dark Souls Fix v 04 Games Download - Downz.Net

  90. I really want to buy this game, but my PC uses an ATI Radeon HD 6800 (AMD) graphics card. I am aware of some issues being present with the fix for AMD cards.
    I have read the readme of every version, and am actively following the discussion on Neogaf. Does the 0.4 version work well (or at least sufficiently well) for AMD cards?

    Lest I forget, thank you Durante for your work on improving this port.

    • From what I’ve heard, it should run well at moderate resolutions (1080p), you just won’t be able to do the massive downsampling that some people are using.

  91. Pingback: Best Pc Games 2010 | Unofficial Dark Souls PC mod fixes rendering resolution • News • PC • Eurogamer.net

  92. Pingback: Dark Souls: una mod non ufficiale risolve il problema della risoluzione

  93. When i run the game with this mod (i put the 2 files in the same folder as the .exe), it works fine all the way from initial cinematics till character creation. after that i get this: http://tinypic.com/r/10wk7zp/6 when i try to printscreen, the printscreen that i capture is all white, as if the computer can only capture the top left white box and not the HUD on the bottom left. Also, the game itself works fine. i still hear myself slashing at the wall when i click. i still can move, i just cant see anything. helpppp! game worked fine before this mod btw!

  94. Hello, I can’t register with a generic mail on neogaf. So I write on your blog.
    I read that you want to know how to make working ambient occlusion with Dark Souls.
    I find the tip (He take me some time)… Put the SAME resolution in your txt file and in the ingame resolution. It only work with your fix (so thanks again for that.).
    Profile fallout 3 or fable the last is great.
    It take me few hours to discovered that :)

    I hope I can help you like you do for me with your fix. The game is so much beautiful with ssao
    David

  95. Pingback: Dark Souls Resolution Mod | True PC Gaming

  96. Thanks man,
    donated a bit :)

    Because you’re doing the work for a company that should do this in the first place.

    Have a nice day.

  97. I put the file in with the executable like the read me said, but the game would not open at all. Then I took the file back out, and the game started again. I know very little about computers. Can someone tell me why this didn’t appear to work? It was version 5.

  98. Pingback: IndianVideoGamer | Video Game News, Video Game Reviews, Indian Video Games | » Review: Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition

  99. I put the .dll file where the Dark Souls executable was, but when I started the game it crashes on the logo screen and says ” Dark Souls executable stopped working.” The rest of the files worked fine. I’m just wondering why the game keeps crashing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>