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The Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine mod delivers the remastered experience this game demands

The Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine dramatically improves and modernising the often overlooked Dark Souls 2. Digital Foundry checks it out.

Better still, this mod even offers multiple quality settings, ramping up to the PCSS option - for Nvidia's contact hardening soft shadows - which allows diffuse shade to appear the farther it gets from the light source. Fundamentally, this is a more accurate variant of AO that limits the so-called halo artefacts around a player as they pass a shaded corner, or grass - a problem with the vanilla Dark Souls 2's built-in ambient occlusion. Looking to the future, the creator of Lighting Engine is also busy at work on a similar upgrade for Dark Souls 3, with GTAO, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, plus Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR options planned for the third game.

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