14 DAY TRIAL // Dark Souls 2 was just released on PC today, allowing the PC Master Race to die like the rest of the console peasants, facing various unfair monsters and the gruesome force of gravity.
For those of you who have the action role-playing game and are not experiencing the many Dark Souls 2 issues that everyone is talking about, there is something very cool to try out. For those of you who do, well, publisher Bandai Namco offered some temporary solutions while they work on solving them. Sorry.
Anyway, the famous Durante, a modder that goes by the layman name of Peter Thoman, has done it again. Many people may not know exactly what he is famous for, so here it is: he created a mod that vastly improved the visual quality of Dark Souls on PC, by making use of the immense graphics computing power that is usually wasted on console ports.
Today, he struck again, delivering a new graphics mod, this time around for the much-anticipated PC version of From Software's Dark Souls 2.
The release is currently in a very early alpha state, open for public testing, but it brings a host of visual enhancements, such as ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, depth of field, texture modding and other such effects that are usually tacked on static shots meant to promote a game before its launch.
The mod has been released in time with the launch of Dark Souls 2 on PC, but creator Peter Thoman says that it is being designed with the intention to work with multiple games.
Thoman calls his mod GeDoSaTo, which is a fancier way of saying Generic Downsampling Tool. He details on his blog that the miraculous idea came to him after working on developing graphics fixes for Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition, imagining a world in which everyone would be able to use downsampling on any game, without being restricted by their monitor or display driver.
He imagined a world where everyone could downsample at high refresh rates and the quality of real-time scaling was that traditionally achieved in image manipulation software, without any prior knowledge of Windows programming or even access to a compiler, allowing artists to work on any game and not just the ones that are being designed to be modifiable by their developers.
Thoman explains that the way GeDoSaTo works is by telling a game that a certain resolution is supported but then actually using "a different resolution in hardware, while pretending to use the other resolution to the software client. The final image is then downsampled (in a very high quality fashion) before being displayed on the screen."
The implications of this are astounding, but for now we're reserved in our excitement as there's still a long way to go until that dream is realized. For now, we're content with GeDoSaTo for Dark Souls 2, available on our website, delivering a better-looking game on PC.