The Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin Lighting Engine mod, originally published on Nexus in May 2023, has aimed since its inception to improve the visuals of FromSoftware’s game released in 2014. It started with volumetric fog, ground truth ambient occlusion (GTAO), new distant geometry and many more lights casting shadows, improved material rendering for metals/non-metals, and adaptive tessellation.
Over time, modder GanaBoy added more features, such as parallax occlusion mapping and PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows) shadow filtering. The most interesting addition, however, is NVIDIA DLAA/DLSS support. GanaBoy is still testing the upscaler, but he published two videos showing how much of an improvement DLAA and DLSS can bring to Dark Souls 2’s visual, especially when it comes to reducing aliasing on grass.
If you’re so impressed with the enhancements that you cannot wait for GanaBoy to upload the new mod version on Nexus, a beta release is available via the official Discord of the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine mod. While there is already a sharpening slider, the modder said it doesn’t currently work, probably due to the lack of another library. As with any DLAA/DLSS mod, it requires a PC equipped with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20/30/40 Series graphics cards. That said, someone may reverse engineer support for AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution and/or Intel XeSS, which work cross-platform. It has happened before with several PC games.
Dark Souls 2 is considered to be the least successful game in FromSoftware’s series, though it does have a sizable following despite its flaws. Following the third installment in Dark Souls, FromSoftware has moved on to create Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, and Elden Ring, the latter of which has broken all of the studio’s previous records when it comes to critical and commercial reception.
