Playing on PC (PS4 version never had these issues), and above fix worked for me. Got past bonfire. Thanks!POssible fix for you:
Hit by the Firelink Shrine bonfire crash in Dark Souls 3? Here's a fix | PC Gamer
Set lighting to low for now until a driver addresses it or a patch from From software. It may be an Nvidia issue.
I am still on 361.75, not sure I want to update at this point since I am not having any issues.According to GeForce Experience it is 364.72 which was the game ready driver for Dark Soul III. It came out at the end of March and I only grabbed it b/c of Paragon optimizations but guess it works out either way.