How To Fix Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition General Errors and Crashes

Last year’s biggest RPG has been ported to the PC, but just like most of the console ports, Dark Souls come with a huge list of errors, crashes and bugs. We have tried to collect the most popular issues with the port to help you fix them.

First of all, make sure that Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition recommended PC specifications are met:

• CPU: 2.6 GHZ Dual Core or higher
• RAM: 1GB for XP or 2GB for Vista/7
• Operating system: Windows XP, Vista or 7
• HDD: At least 4 GB on installation drive
• VGA: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT/ATI Radeon 4850 or higher with at least 512 MB of video memory
• Direct X: Direct X 9.0 is mandatory, those on Win 7 will need to install Direct x 9.0 in order to play

If your system matches the above specifications and you are still here, then you are definitely having other problems. Here is a list of most popular problems being faced by the PC port of Dark Souls:

Fix: My game crashes upon launching the .exe file

There are several possible fixes for launch crashes. Try the following one by one to see if it fixes your problems:

1. Make sure you have the latest graphic drivers installed for your ATI or Nvidia based graphics card.
2. If you are running a system on Crossfire or SLI, try turning off the option through your manufacturer’s control panel.
3. Dark Souls has problems with Quad Core CPUs. Try turning off multiple cores from the task manager. If you are on a Quad Core system, try using only Core 1 and Core 3. To do this, simply press CTRL+ALT+DEL on your Windows and find the Dark Souls.exe. Right click on the process and set its affinity. From there on check the boxes of Core 1 and 3 only.
4. Anti-viruses are known to cause issues. If you are running any, especially AVG, try completely disabling its real time shields or you can even uninstall it completely.
5. Try turning off the V-sync option through Dark Souls if you face frequent crashes even if the game manages to launch itself. You can alternatively use your GPU control panel to force shut down V-Sync.
6. Increase your virtual memory on all drives.

Fix: Dark Souls immediately crashes after I press the Play button.

In this scenario, you will need to run Dark Souls in compatibility mod. To do this, go to your installation directory and find the Dark Souls.exe file. Right click on it and go to its properties. From there on select the compatibility tab and run the game using different compatibility options such as Windows XP service pack 3.

Fix: Dark Souls resolution is too low

Dark Souls PC version is known to support only resolutions at 720p. If you want to increase the resolution beyond that, there is an unofficial modification available here. You simply need to copy paste the files available to your installation directory for the mod to work. Should you want to remove it, simply delete those files.