In case you missed the news, Dark Souls 3 received a very welcome FPS Boost for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S last night, and Eurogamer's Digital Foundry has already got to work in analysing its performance.
The big positive is that it's a "massive improvement" over the previous version of the game, sitting at a near-perfect 60 frames per-second on both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, and featuring faster loading times as standard.
There's only one catch, and "it's a big one", which is that due to the limitations of FPS Boost, Dark Souls 3 still only runs at 900p resolution on both systems. Digital Foundry says it's "especially disappointing" that Xbox Series X still utilises this resolution, as the upgraded PlayStation 5 version runs at 1080, 60fps with no issues, and it seems very likely that the Xbox Series X would be able to match this as well.
"For now, Dark Souls 3 is a markedly improved experience on Series consoles, but one that is dying to be pushed further on Series X, given the power on tap."
Of course, the Xbox team has never advertised FPS Boost as being a feature that can also improve the resolution of games, so we weren't expecting an upgrade to Dark Souls 3's standard 900p resolution. It's a little disappointing, sure, but the fact that we can now play DS3 at 60fps (at no extra charge!) is certainly nothing to grumble about.
What are your thoughts on Dark Souls 3's FPS Boost for Xbox Series consoles? Tell us down below.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 9
"At no extra charge" I see what you did there š
I fired up the game last night after noticing the update and 900p didn't look worse on my new 4K TV. Picture clarity was the same as my recently deceased 1080p TV.
I am not sure where people come off that lower resolutions on a 4K TV look "soft" due to upscaling. Maybe because I am the max end of the optimal view distance from my TV and things aren't really noticeable at that distance?
I would say it looked better thanks to Auto HDR.
@GamingFan4Lyf the reason it looks 'soft' is because of upscaling interpolation. The reason this 'softens' the image is because of interpolation. A hard edge, like a black line on a white background, that 'contrast' creates a Sharp edge. As interpolation basically spreads out all the pixels to fill the screen and 'interpolates' what colour to fill those gaps in, the pixel between Black and White is 'grey' so creates a 'softer' looking edge.
With 1080p to 4k, 25% of the Pixels are 'native' and 75% are interpolated. 900p is less than 1 in 5 pixels, less than 20% of the image size to blow up to fit the screen. Its like 450p on a 1080p screen...
Admittedly, the much smaller pixel size does mean that the softening effect is 'smaller', but its noticeable to me. 1800p isn't that noticeable at normal seating distance on my 55" 4k TV, but 1440p is noticeably softer to me. I could tell the difference easily between 900p on my XB1 vs 1080p on my PS4 too...
I find it odd that this particular FPS boost required a patch of the game but they didnāt consider just adding a new profile file for it to run higher res on Series X|S while at it. Does not sound like the kind of change that takes too much work to implement.
Didn't the Fallout 4 60fps patch mess with the resolution as well though?
How did they do it in that case but can't in this case?
@BAMozzy Oh I get that, but the way people talk about it you would think it looks like a blurry mess - and it really doesn't. I didn't notice softness at all.
Everything looks so crisp on my new TV no matter the game or resolution. It's not even a top of the line 4K TV, either. It's a Vizio M55Q6-J01.
@Dezzy when they āmess with resolutionā itās only lowering it. What they are doing in such cases is making the FPS boosted version run on Series X without Xbox One X optimizations.
Those cases might, in many/most cases not be able to FPS boost on Series S.
Anything further than that requires devs developing a patch.
FPS Boost is great but really wish they just had all Zenimax games patched properly with higher native res and frame rates.
@Tharsman
I'd thought they'd done more than that. But you might be right, it was just the pre-existing settings. In which case, they're not changing the internal resolution from the outside.
Downloading it right now. Excited to jump back inā¦not as excited at the prospect of facing Sister Friede again. Or The Ringed City.
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