Dark Souls 3 fixes and workarounds – bonfire crash, framerates and more

Dark Souls 3

The release of Dark Souls 3 hasn’t been without its problems; perhaps most notably, crashing that can occur at bonfires. This was a problem even with the pre-release review code (it didn’t affect everyone, our own coverage was entirely unaffected), and doesn’t necessarily have a guaranteed fix yet.

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Nonetheless, there are some workarounds you can try that some have reported as successful.

The most consistent ‘fix’ for the bonfire crashes, at least going by what other players have suggested, is setting the Dark Souls 3 lighting quality to “Low” and reloading the game. Not guaranteed, but worth a try. Watch out, because sometimes the game likes to auto-set the graphics options back to something else (there’s an option to turn this auto-detection off, but it doesn’t always work). Check that your lighting really is at Low if crashes show up again.

Others have suggested that playing as the Knight character makes it happen with less frequency too (the same solution found by some pre-release reviewers with this issue), though that’s less ideal as it dictates your choice of class.

Bizarre as it may seem, some have linked atrocious frame-rates to driver clashes with certain USB devices. If you have headsets or other non-vital peripherals plugged in, it might be worth taking them out as an experiment. Especially if you have a PC that should be able to comfortably cope with the game.

We tried to hook up a PS3 controller and didn’t have much luck initially, it wasn’t until we removed all other control devices, in our case a Saitek joystick, that the game detected the controller. If you were wondering how to get the PS3 controller working, we suggest using the SCpToolKit Xinout wrapper. Follow the instructions o that page first, then go into the Zadig folder and run the executable. Follow the prompts in the Zanig tool to set the config.

Some gamers on Nvidia 500 series cards have been experiencing framerate issues and the solution that appears to work is to use these 314.22 drivers. Other Nvidia users have had success with the  352.84 drivers.

Nvidia framerate issues may be resolved by doing the following which appears to be working for a lot of people.

  • Go to nvidia control panel and add the DarkSouls3.exe
  • Set to adaptive vsync and turn on triple buffering
  • Set maximum prerendered frames to 1
  • Turn on threaded optimization

This release just demonstrates how fickle different PC configurations can be. All three of us at PC Invasion have experienced none of the above problems and we are all using different hardware, Peter on AMD and myself and Tim on Nvidia.

If you spot any more fixes, feel free to add them in the comments and we’ll add them to this page.

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Author
Paul Younger
Founder and Editor of PC Invasion. Founder of the world's first gaming cafe and Veteran PC gamer of over 22 years.