DARK SOULS™ III

DARK SOULS™ III

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Make Dark Souls 3 look better with Rekindled FX
By Razed
This guide will show you how to enhance the graphics of Dark Souls 3 through the usage of a ReShade/SweetFX preset called 'Rekindled FX' and the Nvidia Control Panel.

The goal of this preset was to reduce the overall sepia tone from the game and add various post-processing effects to enhance the visual quality, along with additional anti-aliasing to reduce jagged edges on objects. This is the real cinematic Dark Souls 3 experience.
   
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Article
This is a transcript of an article I wrote here:
http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/introducing-rekindled-fx-dark-souls-3s-first-sweetfx-graphics-enhancer
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As the PC version of Dark Souls 3 releases on April 12th, visual enthusiasts around the world, such as myself, will want to know how they can make their copy of Dark Souls 3 look better.
In the past, there have been tools such as GeDoSaTo, which helped you downsample your resolution or hide the HUD, among other things. I'm happy to report that this time around, such tools are not needed for the majority of gamers. As an Nvidia user, you can downsample through DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) without any issues that result in the game crashing. Additionally, there is now an auto-hide HUD feature in the options menu.

With an urge to contribute to the Souls community similar to what I did with Enhanced Wasteland for Fallout 4, I took it upon myself to create a graphics enhancement preset called Rekindled FX[sfx.thelazy.net] using ReShade with SweetFX—a post-processing injector for games. There is also a video (viewable below) to accompany the ReShade preset, which shows off a variety of 4K PC footage and also compares the difference between vanilla graphics and the SweetFX add-on.

While playing with this graphical preset turned on, you will notice additional anti-aliasing, ambient lighting, changes to the color hue, sharpening, vignetting, a tiny bit of chromatic aberration and much more. In my opinion, this is a huge step forward from the vanilla version of Dark Souls 3, which throws a distasteful sepia filter across every object.

Outside of using the above-mentioned preset, there are additional things you can do to make Dark Souls 3 look as gorgeous as can be. Once again, as an Nvidia user, open up the Nvidia Control Panel and apply additional anti-aliasing under Program Settings. Additionally, set Texture Filtering to 'High Quality' for smoother looking textures. I'd like to note that for SLI users, Dark Souls 3 currently uses the same SLI compatibility bits from Dark Souls 2 and will run at an average of 50fps on a GTX 980 video card. You are able to downsample the game via DSR with minimal FPS loss.

Here is a screenshot to show some of settings you need to apply:

 
If you're a Windows 10 user then you may run into framerate drops caused by using an Xbox controller on the PC version. While this is a nuisance to anyone’s gameplay experience, it can easily be remedied with a simple fix. Initially found by reddit user LarryCulpepper, a guide on Reddit details the issue and also provides a solution. According to the post, you need to open up the Device Manager in Windows and find your Xbox controller device. Next, right click it and select 'Update driver software'. When it asks how you would like to update, select "Browse computer for device software" and then select "Let me select from a list of device drivers on my computer", which should show you a list of driver versions. The post says to select version 2.1.0.1349 and then reboot your computer. After all is done, you will be able to play Dark Souls 3 on Windows 10 without any major framerate hiccups.

To view comparison screenshots and download Rekindled FX for yourself, head to the preset's official page.[sfx.thelazy.net]
Screenshots















Installation
 
• Download Rekindled FX from here: http://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/5431/download/

• Place all the files in your root Dark Souls 3 Game directory.
This should be located at:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\DARK SOULS III\Game"

• Run the game normally and it should load with your new ReShade/SweetFX Preset.

Want a 10 FPS increase with this preset? Disable Ambient Lighting. Go to the following folder: ReShade/Presets/Default/ and open up "Shaders_by_Ganossa.cfg". Next, scroll down to Line 48 where it says "#define USE_AMBIENT_LIGHT 1 //[AmbientLight] //-" Change the 1 to a 0 and Save the file. This will disable the Ambient Lighting effect but increase the framerate.

• Make sure that FRAPS, Dxtory and other third-party programs that may interfere with this preset are not running in the background. You can only run FRAPS after the game is launched.

Ignore the yellow text that appears in the left corner of the screen for a few seconds, it is normal.

• If you are having an issue with the Steam Overlay, simply launch the game in Windowed Mode and then change it to Fullscreen once it has launched.

• You can press the "Scroll Lock" key on your keyboard to toggle the preset on and off.
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UNINSTALLING:

Delete dxgi.dll, Reshade.fx and the ReShade folder from your 'Dark Souls III/Game/' directory.
 
 
188 Comments
Despair 4 Jul, 2021 @ 1:09am 
It works but not as good as the screenshots...
Not a Gamer 15 Jun, 2018 @ 1:55pm 
I loved this preset but it appears it no longer works
Multidirectional 28 May, 2018 @ 11:00am 
That screenshot of Nvidia CP settings clearly shows you've got no clue what you're doing. Multisampling and Transparency Supersampling? They do not work in DSIII. Not to mention "additional antialiasing from SweetFX". The hell is that supposed to mean? All sweetfx can do is force SMAA or FXAA, which will do nothing to fix the goddawful shimmering in that game.
RavageWaffle 13 Dec, 2017 @ 3:13pm 
I can't seem to see a diffrence other than a see through black sheet on my screen. Am I doing somthing wrong?
Nebel Omichli 1 Dec, 2017 @ 6:09pm 
Great colouration changes, however the blurred text (and ui in general) are a major setback to me... especially distracting if you need to change equipment on the fly as the items appear to be less defined. Other than that a solid improvement over the ghastly orange skies of the vanilla game.
Minds 25 Sep, 2017 @ 5:55pm 
Im drooling over the video and screenshot comparisons, but dissapointed that my game looks no where near as good, what did you tweak?
Desinovita 14 Jul, 2017 @ 12:23pm 
To anyone asking, you won't get banned for this. I've been using it since a few months after launch and have been fine, enjoy
neekO 9 Jul, 2017 @ 6:22pm 
I'm not sure what I'm doimg wrong, but my game doesn't look anywhere near as good as your screenshots. I am running everything at max at 1440p on a GTX 1080 and can't seem to get any decent antialiasing and the only real change I notice from the preset are a difference in color tones. Messing with the control panel has yielding close to no results...what am I doing wrong?
21 4 Jun, 2017 @ 8:44am 
Hm, so this is for the people that have been using this in a long time.
Can it get me banned?
BlueCyanide 30 May, 2017 @ 1:44am 
Thank you :praisesun: