Dark Souls 3 PC performance thread

SLI 980s and stutters fps dips like crazy for me
i7 4790k
win 10
16GB

I'm having frequent stutter in multiple areas with Titan X SLI, no matter the resolution: 4K, 1440p, 1080p. Is it due to SLI? Can anyone confirm?

It happens in many areas, a constant drop to 55ish fps frequently. Locking the framerate to 45 fps still lowers it to 40 fps with the stuttering.

I'm running i7 4771 processor, too. And the game is on a SSD.

This is so weird....nothing fixes the problem. Bleck.

Disabling Hyperthreading improved that for me.

i7 4790
SLI 980s
 
Every time I restart the "shader quality" is going back to "low". Auto detect settings is off.

Someone else with this little strange issue?
 
At work now, but i played like 20 minutes before coming to labor. The game fluctuated between 42-60 frames in the first areas with the high preset 1080 on:

I5 4460 3.3 ghz (no OC)
8 gb ram
Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 2 gb
Windows 8.1

I tried the medium preset and the lows were now at 48, then tried the low preset and was spot on 60, but the water puddles looked really fugly. At the end i tried the max preset(with only high textures because 2 gb video card) and the lows went to 40 in the most intense lightning effects. So i guess i will give it a go with 30 locked on max or high.

Had zero crashes even in the bonfire areas, but i don't remember now my installed drivers. The only major problems was that my 360 controller didn't function at all, so i guess i will check the device manager and see if another previous detected controller is the fault.
 
So the game just crashed on me after a "Low on memory" message.
i5 2500k
8GB Ram

Everything was running on a consistent 60, then this happened. I know I can do something regarding virtual memory, but how much do I assign to the min and max values?

Minimum 2048mb, max 4093mb has worked for a couple of us itt
 
Wow. Just got a constant stream of crashes in Firelink Shrine. The only fix was to bone home. . .to Firelink Shrine. This. . .is bad.
 
i5 6600K @ 4.4GHz
16GBs DDR4 @ 3GHz
7970 3GB @ 1000/1450

At 1920x1080 with high settings I was getting 60fps with dips as low as 49fps.
I changed everything to med except max textures and high SSAO and held 60fps alot better still get small infrequent dips to maybe 56fps.

No crashes.
 
1440P 60fps max but only low motion blur. ( what setting for motion blur do people prefer? The game seemed slightly "doll like" with no motion blur)

980TI 75% load 16 gb ddr4

The only performance problem I've noticed is that summon signs sometimes cause the game to stutter for a moment. It's not a major problem but it is annoying. Generally impressed with the look of the game at high resolution plays very nicely. If you're thinking about making the jump to higher resolution I can tell you it was worth it for me.
 
290x 8GB
4670k @ 4.0 with C states and HT disabled
16GB

game is butter for me 1080p/60 maxed (-blur), even with a MPC-HC playing something on my second monitor
 
i7-4770k @4.5 GHz
16 GB RAM
980 Ti oc'ed

At 1440p/max settings it looks like a relatively smooth 60 fps. A few drops here and there but nothing major.

What's it take to run this game at 4K/30Hz?
 
I have:
GTX970
i5-4670k@3,4 GHz
8GB ram

Getting unplayable amount of framedrops, goes from 50-60 (Just that is bad in and of itself, it's almost never up in 60 on any setting) to 1-20 frames about every 10 sec at times, this is in tutorial area so it shouldn't be too demanding so something wrong.
Playing in 1080p btw.
 
GTX 760 with i5 Quad 3.2 Ghz. Running it 1920x1080 with high settings.

Running smooth as butter.

Which is kind of crazy considering I just finished Dark Souls on my PC and it was choppy, haha.
 
i5 4690k, GTX 970, 16 GB RAM, running off an SSD.

Runs almost perfectly at max 1080p so far, occasional stutters when picking up some items, but not always. Weird problem.
 
I have to say I'm noticing a fair amount of pop in now that I'm in
the poison swamp area
 
So I was finally able to get DS3 to not crash at 4k, and much to my surprise I was getting a locked 60 FPS. AA, DoF, and motion blur are off and lighting is set to low. All other settings max. Turning AA on didn't make a real difference in image quality and it didn't affect FPS so I just kept it off.

Large PNG of the third area
 
GTX 960 4GB
16GB RAM
i5 6500

Playing on 1920x1080, high settings. Getting a pretty consistent 60fps besides from when it stutters for a second when it auto-saves..
 
Gtx 960 4gb/i5 6600/8gb ram here, getting 45-60 fps on max settings (1920x1080) just in case anyone with a similar setup is interested in how it runs
 
Any way to lock the lighting setting to low in a ini setting somewhere? It keeps resetting in the game randomly.

Setting the config file to read-only may work. You'll find it in C:\Users\[account name]\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsIII.
 
i5 2500k, 8GB RAM and a GTX570.

It's definitely rough. Running everything on the lowest and even had to turn down the resolution and it still ranges wildly from 15-50 fps. CPU and RAM are at decent levels while playing, it must be hitting the GPU really hard. The very first area was the worst, especially when looking at the sky. Still playable though. I should be able to tweak the settings to get it a little better looking while maintaining the current framerate. It's weird, I think this is the first game to really give it trouble. Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 weren't an issue for it. Finally starting to considering a new video card.
 
Does anyone else's "ambient noise" in the background restart every time they move the cursor, or press a button?

Yes, I had this and it was super annoying. But after I restarted the game it disappeared. Try it. [Edit: and now it's back again... it's horrible]

Apart from that game runs great, no stuttering or crashes so far. GTX 970 here, max settings on 1080p and I have stable 60 FPS in the first area of the game. Also I had no crash at first bonfire that many people report.
 
Yeah, there's a ton of low detail hanging just out of your normal field of view.

I wonder if this is a result of having the levels be so goddamn huge.

Regardless, this is easily the ugliest souls game. Although it's "mute everything fuck color greys and red forever" direction doesn't do it any favors everything looks so rough and the texture quality on max sucks. It feels like I'm playing a poorly optimized game from 2010.

So are half the textures in the game supposed to be muddy, blurry garbage? I have the Lothric Knight's armor and all the metal bits look so messy and terrible I can barely tell what I'm looking at. Nevermind stuff like the textures on the cliff during the scene after the second boss fight (who had way less HP than I was expecting)
 
yeah...the autosave stutter is the only issue I've had with the PC version so far (Cemetery of Ash and Firelink Shrine areas)...no bonfire crashes, memory errors, etc that I've seen here

i5-4690K
290X (16.4.1 Driver)
16GB RAM
Game installed on HDD

nothing overclocked...all settings at the highest except DoF and Motion Blur off (preference)...1080p/60 FPS at almost all times so far
 
GTX970
i5 2500K ocd to 3300
SSD
16 gb ram

NOTE: Upgraded to nvidia's latest drivers last night, had to rollback to the first week of March drivers as the game constantly crashed (was global, did in the Division too so the low lighting trick does not apply here).

Running at 2560 x 1440 medium with occasional hitches, otherwise looks great and mostly stable frame-rate.

Could be better but I'm happy.
 
Apparently, some people have fixed this for themselves by setting power management mode to "prefer maximum performance" in the nvidia control panel.

Have mine set at that, does nothing. The stuttering when picking up items etc has to be something else.
 
i5 2500k, 8GB RAM and a GTX570.

It's definitely rough. Running everything on the lowest and even had to turn down the resolution and it still ranges wildly from 15-50 fps. CPU and RAM are at decent levels while playing, it must be hitting the GPU really hard. The very first area was the worst, especially when looking at the sky. Still playable though. I should be able to tweak the settings to get it a little better looking while maintaining the current framerate. It's weird, I think this is the first game to really give it trouble. Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 weren't an issue for it. Finally starting to considering a new video card.

Might want to check this out.
 
i5-6600K
R9 270 stock
16GB DDR4 RAM
1080P Ultra settings

37FPS avg
23FPS min(so far has only ever dipped below 30FPS twice, both during the transformation animation of a boss/monster)
60FPS max
 
Towards the end of my last night's playing session the game was constantly crashing near the firelink shrine bonfire.

I don't know if it makes any difference but I only had pants equipped on my character + shortsword and shield. Graphics settings were maxed out at 1080p using a gtx 780ti, 16GB or RAM and i7 3770.

Once I lowered lighting to "High" instead of "Max" this seems to have done the trick and I actually managed to take a steps away from the bonfire without crash! Success! Tonight I will see if the crashing persists.

Convinced there's some major memory leaks at play here.

I also hate how this seems to be how most modern PC games work for me - I enjoy the game itself for a short time and then I'm being converted to a fucking beta tester for bugs...I guess that's what you sign up for when purchasing new games on day 1...

Edit: Has anyone on a fairly similar system checked RAM (not VRAM) usage during DS3?
 
Hey guys, if anyone else has crashing with "Your computer is running low on memory", monitor losing connection, other general weirdness, and setting lighting to low doesn't do anything, maybe try the following suggestion (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4edfpm/pc_tech_support_megathread/d1z9ot9)

For reference I have 6GB of RAM, which I was worried might be the issue, but the games been running fine at around 40 - 60 FPS on max settings (GTX 780) aside from the crashing, which I think this fixed.

For Windows 8 (and probably 10):

-search "This PC"
-right click "This PC" and select Properties
-select "Advanced System Settings" in the sidebar
-Select the advanced tab
-under Performance, click "Settings"
-select the Advanced tab
-under Virtual Memory, select "Change"
-de-select "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives".
-Select your primary drive (probably C:) and select Custom Size
How much you set for the virtual memory here is up to you, people had results with at least 2048MB but I set that as the initial size, and set the maximum size to 4093MB. I had two drives so I set both of them to have this initial and maximum size.

This alone did not fix my crashes, so I also tried the borderless window fix even though it didn't seem like it would do anything. Turns out, for me it did! I was able to play for a whole hour (gasp) without crashing, and I stopped just because I have other things to do. First time I've quit the game on purpose lol. Before that I would literally crash after at most five minutes in game in Lothric, usually with a low memory warning or with my computer completely shutting down and restarting on its own (not a good sign).

The third party app I used for bordered windowless was WindowedBorderlessGaming. It came in a zip, and running the executable was enough to get the game to run in windowed borderless mode. Like I said, since then I haven't had any issues (granted I've only played an hour since then)

JaseC, could we mention this fix in the first post? I was getting pretty discouraged when the only fix I could find was setting Lighting to low, and was very relieved to find this fix buried in the reddit tech support megathread! It sounds like there are other people having this issue, though not as many as the lighting problem.

edit:

Give this a shot, hopefully it'll fix the issue for you as well!

Thanks so much for posting this. Upping my virtual memory seems to have fixed it. Didn't even have to mess with borderless window mode.
 
Had one crash after 7 hours of playing and a bunch of alt-tabbing. Not the biggest deal for me.

However, does anyone know how to make the black bars on the top and bottom go away for 16:10 resolutions? (playing at 1680*1050)
 
GTX 770 2Gb, 16Gb RAM, i7 4770

What's strange though is that it occurs only when transiting different areas or accessing the menu. =/

Strange.
According to Afterburner, the game is using more than 2GB VRAM for me at 1080, maybe thats got something to do with it.
 
Game is crashing every single time I try to open the door after the first boss. Running low settings getting 40-60 so I don't think performance is an issue.

Anyone else have this specific crash?
 
Ok, for people who have the issue with ambient sound restarting (and JaseC)

If you have Realtek HD Audio drivers, then update them! (in my case it is version MSI 6.0.1.7730). It fixed the sound problem for me.
 
Game runs at a steady 60fps @ 1440p, except when it's autosaving. It stutters like crazy while the flame icon is onscreen and for a few seconds after. I've got everything on Max except Water Surface and SSAO, which I've got on High.

Specs: i7 3770k @ 4.2, 980Ti, 32 GB RAM.

I realize they've got bigger fish to fry with CTDs and performance issues, but I really hope they can smooth out the autosaves because this game is otherwise gorgeous.
 
i5 4690k, GTX 970, 16 GB RAM, running off an SSD.

Runs almost perfectly at max 1080p so far, occasional stutters when picking up some items, but not always. Weird problem.


Exact same specs, and exact same issue. Its barely impacting my enjoyment of the game though, its minor.
 
Tried lowering the resolution so I'm getting a solid 60. Game still crashes the second I try to leave the first boss arena, in either direction.
 
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