I originally intended to provide measurements and graphs here, but Dark Souls 2 generally performs so well on my system that there's no need. Performanceīefore jumping into the options, a quick word on performance. It is also about twice as large as the standard “sfx9999res.ffxbnd” file, which is the same on both PC and consoles. In addition to these main game asset files, the PC version includes a “sfx9999 hq res.ffxbnd” file in the “sfx_hq” folder, which appears to store higher-resolution assets for special effects (such as torch light or particles). In short, everything indicates that the 5 GB difference is caused by higher quality asset data, and a preliminary analysis of the content of these archive files confirms this assumption. The localization and font data only takes up around 30 MB in total, and is in fact the same on PC and PS3. This is not the case for Dark Souls 2: there is only one separate pre-rendered movie, and it is actually smaller in the PC version (likely due to better compression). Previously, PC gamers were sometimes disappointed when, after large downloads, a given size discrepancy compared to console versions was entirely down to higher-quality movie files or additional localization data. Note that the total size in this case is ~5.7 GB, and that the files with the “ Hq ” prefix in the PC version have no equivalent in the PS3 version.
