Performance issues? Check out this guide to help with crashes and low fps!
Dark Souls III has had it's share of bugs and doesn't run great for quite a few people but fear not, we've compiled a list of fixes from the community that should help your game run better and fix things like annoying crashes.
Feel free to comment on if these actually help you and we'll be sure to do more of these guides in the future! Full credit goes to Pistolaobr for writing up his guide.
1. CRASHES
1.1 - This happens because the fog effect, glowing light effect, hair and capes physics is broken, to fix this go to the dark souls 3 settings, and put effects quality, shadow quality and light quality on low.
1.2 - Some people reported that disabling steam overlay stopped the crashes, try it yourself steam app -> Settings -> In-Game Settings TAB -> Uncheck the box next to "Enable Steam Community In-Game" and click OK.
2. LOW FPS IN NVIDIA CARDS
Seems that the game don't use all the nvidia GPU power, to force to use more power this is what you need to do:
2.1 - Use the beta driver 364.96 version made to fix problems with dark souls 3 and the new doom:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/40862.2 - Edit the dark souls 3 profile on nvidia control panel, and disable everything FXAA and Texture filtering, choose the maximum performance on every option, and only let enable the triple buffering, segmented optimization, max of pre-renderized fps = 4, VR pre-renderized fps = 1
P.S. If you have a GeForce 600 or 500 use the 314.22
Desktop win8 win7 64bits:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win8-win7-winvista-64bit-314.22-whql-driver.html
Notebook win8 win7 64bits:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win8-win7-64bit-314.22-whql-driver.html
3. LOW FPS IN CPU's INTEL OR AMD
Seems that dark souls 3 don't use all CPU cores, so to increase the FPS of the one core that the game uses (bad PC port as always), go to your computer bios and disable the Intel H.E.I.S.T or SPEEDSTEP or in case of AMD the cool n' quiet option.
4. LOW FPS IN PCs WITH LESS THAN 8GB RAM
Use Razer Cortex to finalize unnecessary apps and processes running on the background
http://www.razerzone.com/cortex
- P.S. Only use the booster part, don't use the other ones like changing windows configuration, may destroy your O.S, and don't use the save data backup, may get your account banned.
5. GAMEPAD IS FREEZING THE GAME
Disable the vibration on the game settings
6. GAMEPAD NOT WORKING
Update your drivers, see if the gamepad is working properly on control panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Printers n devices, remember than you must use analog mode on the gamepad to be recognized by the game
7. KEYBOARD MOVEMENT LOCKS IN ONE DIRECTION
Press that direction 2x times quickly
8. MOUSE ATTACK + UP ON KEYBOARD DONT DO LURGE OR KICK
Use only the keyboard to do that, like put the bindings below:
Key 1 = light attack
key 2 = strong attack
key 3 = blocking
key 4 = special weapon skill
Than use w+1 and w+2 to do lunge and kick attacks.