The original Dark Souls on PC was undoubtedly a disappointment out of the box, with a 1024x720 native resolution and a 30fps cap that stuck agonisingly close to its console counterparts. Dark Souls 2 is certainly a big improvement on that, offering a generous range of visual options, but does that make for a dramatic improvement over the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions? And are there any catches?
The original game had a toggle for anti-aliasing (a simple blur filter) and another for motion blur, leading to a flood of complaints, but the sequel nips a lot of problems in the bud immediately by adding proper support for resolutions and refresh rates, going as high as your monitor allows - right up to 4K if you're so inclined. For the purposes of our testing, we run the game on patch 1.01 at 1920x1080, which immediately gives the game a marked leap in visual quality compared with the 720p image on consoles.
There's no sign of From Software reverting the PC version's lighting model and textures back to its alluring alpha build, but we do get a hefty graphics menu. Among the choices we have are quality options for textures, shadows, effects, anisotropic filtering, water shaders and character model detail. On top of that, we get toggles for motion blur, screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and depth of field. The anti-aliasing method of choice is FXAA, with no official means of enabling more taxing post-process techniques like SMAA in-game.
Running Dark Souls 2 at its high preset, with all effects enabled, we see very obvious differences to the console releases in some areas and less obvious changes in others. To see the breadth of the visual spectrum here, we add the lowest PC preset into the image zoomer comparisons far below - showing us where the two consoles fall in-between - but first we match up the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions in head-to-head videos, and also produce a lengthy
66-shot Dark Souls 2 comparison gallery.
