Out of DS1 and 2, DS 1 is the superior game though I strongly recommend both the DSFix mod (or its successor) and the PVP Watchdog mod.
The Watchdog mod prevents various hacks from other online players ruining your gameplay and also detects various kinds of cheating, giving you an option to boot the player only if it detects them cheating.
The DSFix allows you to drastically enhance the games original visuals without texture mods or ENB aesthetic changes etc., it simply lets you get a better vanilla visual experience. I'd recommend enabling its 60FPS tweak but configure it to run the game at the original 30FPS, this will arbitrarily resolve some frame rate issues in the game engine. Running the game at above 30FPS speeds the gameplay up and makes the animations silly looking and might cause weird synchronization issues with online multiplayer due to your copy of the game running faster than the other players. You must disable the in-game anti-aliasing setting (does a shitty job to begin with) for DSFix to work correctly, you don't necessarily need to disable the motion blur setting though.
Hell if you tell me the resolution you play the game at I can provide a good DSFix configuration file for you that improves the visuals as much as possible with the best performance/quality trade off, I'll include suggestions for "increasing the visuals even more at the potential cost of significant performance penalties" so you can experiement on your own with the settings/give you a good starting point for experimenting.
Edited by Nicholas Steel, 26 February 2016 - 02:02 AM.