When Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition launched for PC back in 2012, it was, to put it delicately, a bit of a mess. It took the painstaking work of community modders to even get the PC port into a decently playable state, and even with the aid of mods likes DSFix and Dark Souls Input Customizer, the experience was far from ideal. Fortunately, the recently launched Dark Souls Remastered addresses those poor PC optimization issues head-on (no more broken Blighttown!), and even manages to run reasonably well on lower-end PC’s.
Right off the bat, Dark Souls Remastered introduces some noticeable graphical upgrades, bumping the framerate up to a native 60 frames-per-second and allowing the game to run in 4K. You can’t really fiddle with the video options too much (the only four options you can tweak are anti-aliasing, depth of field, motion blur, and ambient occlusion), but according to this recent breakdown from PC Gamer, you shouldn’t have to as long as you have a semi-decent graphics card.
As long as you don’t mind playing a less-pretty version of Dark Souls Remastered, PC Gamer’s report shows that even budget graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 770 2GB and Radeon R9 380 4GB can run the game at decent framerates. Heck, even if you’re playing on a laptop with an integrated graphics chipset like the Intel HD Graphics 630 or AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 11 Graphics, you can still run the game at pretty solid framerates if you’re willing to tone down the graphics quality.
PC Gamer’s report also shows that Dark Souls Remastered is less demanding on your computer’s CPU than the Prepare to Die edition was. The original PC port could be quite taxing on a single CPU core, requiring at least 4.5GHz or higher in order to maintain higher framerates. Dark Souls Remastered, however, is better able to integrate multiple CPU cores, and as long as you have at least a Ryzen 3 2200G or an Intel Core i3-8100 (or better) reaching 60 fps shouldn’t be a problem.