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Developed by two separate teams within From Software, Dark Souls 3 arrives a year on from the excellent Bloodborne, with the apparent aim of bringing closure to the Souls series. The engine of the PlayStation 4 exclusive returns too, now put to work in rendering a beautiful, withered fantasy world on other formats, including Xbox One and PC. Today we focus on the two console versions - a clash that reunites Sony's machine with From's core tech to bring out some clear PS4 advantages.To start, this is the first Dark Souls title where resolution differs between two console competitors. The final PS4 code pushes a native 1920x1080 image - as was the expectation after its network beta - while Xbox One instead opts to upscale from a lower 1600x900 frame-buffer. Such a resolution drop on Microsoft's machine marks a running trend across this generation so far, and Dark Souls 3 joins a growing list of titles where PS4 offers an image quality lead. To back this, both consoles use a matching style of post-process anti-aliasing to deal with visual noise.
Despite this extra upscale, Xbox One still presents Lothric in a flattering light. In play, the one truly perceptible shortfall of its native 900p image is that pixel crawl flares up more aggressively across foliage - though otherwise its visuals hold up very well. Bizarrely, all HUD elements on Xbox One (such as menus and health bars) are also rendered at 900p. Rather than setting these 2D elements to display at 1080p over gameplay - a tactic used in most sub-native titles - they're instead put through the same scaling process. As a result we get a light blur to item illustrations, one that shows up next to PS4's, and it's a shame given there is a commonly practiced workaround here.
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