Dark Souls Remastered: how much of an upgrade is it?
Of all the remasters coming out this generation, Dark Souls might be the most hotly anticipated. It's a chance to revisit one of the most beloved of games from the last console generation, using today's technology to improve visuals tremendously and to iron out the game's notorious performance issues. We've already had an early taster of the Switch port - based on trailer footage, at least - and initial impressions were of a conservative conversion for Nintendo's console hybrid. Now we've had the chance to play a preview build on PS4 Pro, and clearly there's a lot more to it visually.
As you might expect, Sony's super-charged console features 4K display support. We can confirm that with 4K output select, the current build of the game delivers a native 3200x1800 resolution. It's not the true 4K some may have wished for, but the pixel density is high enough that it delivers a sharp, beautiful image, even if there is upscaling involved on the final resolve to an Ultra HD screen. More surprising is how well the world design holds up at such a high resolution, seven years on from the game's initial launch. The Pro version of the remaster delivers a 7.8x increase in pixel-count over the 1024x720 of the original PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.
We'll have to see what the other consoles are doing nearer release. Especially, we're curious about the Xbox One X code, where the extra GPU horsepower could feasibly translate to a native 3840x2160 - a full 4K output. For now, the fact is Dark Souls has no trouble hitting 1800p on Pro, and better yet - doing it at with 60 frames per second as the target. Also good news is that game-level super-sampling is implemented, so 1080p screen users get extra anti-aliasing thrown into the mix - an advantage over a base PS4's native res, understood to be 1920x1080.
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