14 DAY TRIAL // Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition appeared on the PC earlier today and immediately those who bought it noticed a pretty shocking problem: the game has a fixed rendering resolution of 1024x720. Luckily, this has now been solved by a player who developed a special mod for the game.
Dark Souls came out last year onto the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms, delighting many gamers with its extremely challenging gameplay.
After lots of pleading from PC gamers, developer From Software and publisher Namco Bandai announced that they’d release a special version of the game for that platform, in the form of the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.
Today, the RPG has finally been released onto the platform via the Steam and the GameStop digital distribution services.
Unfortunately, as soon as players started up the game, they found that the title has a fixed rendering resolution of 1024x720, meaning that, if they play on a higher resolution, the image would be distorted to fit their setting.
This, as you can imagine, resulted in some rather disappointing visuals.
Thankfully, a NeoGAF forum member named Durante started tinkering with the game and came up with a mod that overrides the game’s graphics system and sets custom values for the resolution.
The intrepid modder also posted a helpful FAQ on the forum, sharing more details about the mod and how it works, as well as a warning that it might not help all Dark Souls PC players.
What is it? It's an interception d3d9.dll that you place in the same folder as the game executable. It intercepts the game's calls to the DirectX 9 API and changes them as necessary to enable a higher internal rendering resolution.
How do I use it?
Place d3d9.dll and DSfix.ini into the game's binary directory (the place where DARKSOULS.exe is). You can open DSfix.ini with a text editor to adjust the desired internal resolution.
Will it work?
So far, this has only been tested on my computer, on the first half hour or so of the game. I can not and will not guarantee that it will work for anyone else, or not have any adverse effect on your game/computer. Use at your own risk! If you encounter any issues that seem like they could be caused by DSfix, let me know.
Will it cause performance problems?
That depends on your system configuration. Usually, performance scales rather linearly with framebuffer size, and so far this game does not seem different. My 660 maintained a locked 30 FPS throughout ~ 1/2 hour of testing in the starting area of the game at 2560x1440. You can download the mod right now from Softpedia.