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Dark Souls internal rendering resolution fix (DSfix)

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
Spiritual reasons. Principals, expectations, that sort of thing. There's nothing actually wrong with playing Dark Souls at 1024x720 (as evidenced by all the players that loved the console versions), but everyone was hoping for more.

On a 5760x1080 display, everything is wrong with playing it at that resolution.
 

Exuro

Member
The upgrade is pretty obvious, just compare to this:

QUOTE]Maybe it's just me but on first glance the character models looked like old school sprites.
 
Might be able to force MSAA and SS in Nvidia Inspector with Dirt profiles, same engine.

That is probably what is causing some of the blurry textures in those shots, maybe a mix of motion blur and FXAA.


The game on console uses 2xMSAA, from digital foundry:

"The decision to decrease the resolution from Demon's Souls' 1280x720 is more than made up for by the additional coat of 2x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) lavished upon the overall image. This clears up the rough edges that blighted the look of its AA-deprived predecessor"

There might be an additional blur filter or something that causes the fog but it's not fxaa; maybe it's fixable by an ini edit.

Also:

"On top of this, it appears a post-processing filter running on the PS3 version is affecting the clarity of certain text elements, such as the Estus Flask notification in the bottom-left of the screen. As with most filters working indiscriminately across the whole frame, text and HUD elements often get caught in the line of fire, although it really only seems to have affected the text in this case. On very close zoom, this filter is also the likely cause of a very subtle softening to the definition of distant textures not evident on 360. These are nitpicks more than anything, and are only evident when closely scrutinized next to images of the rival version."
 

iNvid02

Member
Thanks, Durante, Namco owes you some compensation if this leads to more sales.

and evilore, sites will probably pick this up real soon and gaf will explode

edit: yup gamespy has got it: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dark-souls/1225853p1.html

This is embarrassingly awesome. Apparently a NeoGAF user who goes by the name of Durante has managed to fix the oft-reported limited resolution options of Dark Souls on PC. The best part? He says it took him around half an hour to find the code line, fix it, and apply the change.
You can follow this link to the NeoGAF thread to see the high-res screenshot of Dark Souls rendered at 2048x1440 with no anti-aliasing.

If you'd like to keep an eye on Durante's progress, keep an eye on this thread where he'll eventually post a download link for this resolution fix.
 

Durante

Member
Durante, do you have an eta to when the first version will be placed for download? Hopefully within the next 10 hours right, at least for the US people like me who have to wait midnight pst for the game.
~4 hours from now. (Will be 3am here then, hope I don't fall asleep!)
 
Thank you so much Durante, hopefully when you are done with the first release you can work on modifying the FOV for triple screen gaming :) Or maybe the game will modify it automatically when using a triple screen resolution.

Are you hard coding the resolutions or listing the ones in Windows?
 
Awesome work Durante, I'm very close to going ahead a buying the game with your fix. Hopefully we can get some better AA methods applied, as someone else pointed out, maybe try the Dirt 3 profile in NVinspector?
 

zkylon

zkylewd
The whole HUD remains correctly positioned, but it's just scaled, so it will still be as low-res as before. Maybe at some point I'll try to scale the hud down, but it's certainly not a priority now.
Yeah, that's the only bad thing about this, though I guess it's no difference from the vanilla game's.
 

Durante

Member
Would it be possible to add support in a future version for other injectors, such injectSMAA and FXAA injectors?
Yes, it should even be possible to integrate them before the HUD rendering. But that's quite a lot of work so a bit further out.

And it would only make sense if I manage to fix the inherent blur first!

Thank you so much Durante, hopefully when you are done with the first release you can work on modifying the FOV for triple screen gaming :)
Possible, but may well break the game's rendering (stuff outside the normal FoV may be invisible).

Are you hard coding the resolutions or listing the ones in Windows?
It's just an .ini file that looks like this:
Code:
renderWidth 2560
renderHeight 1440
logLevel 1
 
Kudos to Durante (give the man a proper tag).

If anything, this will maybe push From Software into trying to offer better solutions for its game.

Again, amazing work. And amazing timing.
 
Yes, it should even be possible to integrate them before the HUD rendering. But that's quite a lot of work so a bit further out.

And it would only make sense if I manage to fix the inherent blur first!

Possible, but may well break the game's rendering (stuff outside the normal FoV may be invisible).

It's just an .ini file that looks like this:
Code:
renderWidth 2560
renderHeight 1440
logLevel 1

Thanks Durante!!!, Will let you know what happens in triple screens when running the patch tomorrow :)
 

S0N0S

Member
Yes, it should even be possible to integrate them before the HUD rendering. But that's quite a lot of work so a bit further out.

And it would only make sense if I manage to fix the inherent blur first!

Possible, but may well break the game's rendering (stuff outside the normal FoV may be invisible).

It's just an .ini file that looks like this:

Thanks again Durante. I'm gunna donate the $8 I saved buying the game from GMG to you.
 

Durante

Member
FWIW I'd love to work for From, it may not sound like it but I have a huge amount of respect for what they do -- when it's not porting stuff to PC at least :p

As for all the GFWL questions:
We don't know yet. Check back in 4 hours!
 

Ceebs

Member
Great work, but this makes me just shake my head that the game is releasing as it is if the fix was so simple.
 

LiK

Member
FWIW I'd love to work for From, it may not sound like it but I have a huge amount of respect for what they do -- when it's not porting stuff to PC at least :p

you're getting press and word of mouth. maybe someone from Bamco can hire you to fix their shit port.
 

Cheeto

Member
Nice work Durante!

Is there any possibility of the game breaking in the later portions? I remember when this scandal about the resolution first broke there was a post on some forum from a guy who works in the industry. He basically outlined a few techniques they probably used to get the game running smoothly on consoles, which he claimed would make it very difficult to allow adjustment of resolution. I think one of the major points was about the way they rendered fur on some boss...he said they used a certain technique to render it and that increasing the frame buffer resolution would have a game-breaking impact. Does anyone know which boss this is??
 

chiablo

Member
Nice work Durante!

Is there any possibility of the game breaking in the later portions? I remember when this scandal about the resolution first broke there was a post on some forum from a guy who works in the industry. He basically outlined a few techniques they probably used to get the game running smoothly on consoles, which he claimed would make it very difficult to allow adjustment of resolution. I think one of the major points was about the way they rendered fur on some boss...he said they used a certain technique to render it and that increasing the frame buffer resolution would have a game-breaking impact. Does anyone know which boss this is??

That guy's forum post was almost immediately debunked and he was proven to be either incompetent or a fraud.
 

Durante

Member
Is there any possibility of the game breaking in the later portions?
Yes.

To go into more detail:
Anything can happen. This is not well tested at all. I need people to understand that.
However, I think it's rather unlikely that there will be a catastrophic performance breakdown later in the game. At worst, performance scales linearly with resolution, so a modern gaming PC featuring 10x console performance should by all rights be able to render it at 1080p and still maintain a better framerate than consoles.
 

Serra

Member
I think one of the major points was about the way they rendered fur on some boss...he said they used a certain technique to render it and that increasing the frame buffer resolution would have a game-breaking impact. Does anyone know which boss this is??

Sounds like Great Wolf Sif.
 
Nice work Durante!

Is there any possibility of the game breaking in the later portions? I remember when this scandal about the resolution first broke there was a post on some forum from a guy who works in the industry. He basically outlined a few techniques they probably used to get the game running smoothly on consoles, which he claimed would make it very difficult to allow adjustment of resolution. I think one of the major points was about the way they rendered fur on some boss...he said they used a certain technique to render it and that increasing the frame buffer resolution would have a game-breaking impact. Does anyone know which boss this is??
Unsurprisingly, that turned out to be completely false dribble from someone who has no idea what they were talking about. Just forget you ever read anything he wrote.
 

TheExodu5

Banned
Durante, if you don't mind me asking, is programming your profession, or is it just a hobby?

He has a Computer Science major, but what he's done here is definitely hobby related. Programming doesn't really help all that much here...you need to know how games are rendered through the DirectX API as well as how to intercept calls to it.

That guy's forum post was almost immediately debunked and he was proven to be either incompetent or a fraud.

I was seriously shaking my head at the reasoning behind that guy's post.

Seriously, besides 2D framebuffer effects not being scaled properly, I can't think of much that could break due to a simple resolution change.

That being said, resolution can have a weird impact in some games. Take Counter-Strike 1.6 for example. At high resolutions, not only is there a small deadzone for mouse movement, but headshots are much harder to get than at 640*480 or 800*600. Weird stuff, I know.
 
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