HairyblueBaldur's Gate 3 PC tech review: polish that puts other AAA games to shame
Baldur's Gate 3 is a game of the year contender - but how does its PC release stack up in terms of visuals and performa…
(Thankfully, you can use the launch command --skip-launcher to boot straight into the DX11 version of the game, or use --skip-launcher --vulkan to boot straight into Vulkan.)
And
In terms of overall recommendations then, I'd suggest DirectX 11 is a better choice than Vulkan for most users with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, especially those with relatively modern CPUs that meet BG3's recommended specifications. While Vulkan did run better in static scenes when CPU-limited, its poorer performance than DX11 in NPC-rich areas is problematic, making DirectX 11 a better choice overall.
Looks like these guys say DirectX 11 is usually the better pick. I've been running Vulkan and the only negative I've seen is there is a large block that will flicker slightly on the right side of the screen in cinematics. I've going to try DirectX 11 and see if I get the same FPS and quality today. Vulkan with DLSS on quality I get around 100+ FPS. I have a Nvidia 3080TI and intel i7 12700KF.
JarmerThis is so funny because it’s the opposite recommendation I’ve seen basically everywhere else. All other notes I’ve seen have recommended Vulcan for newer hardware. I’ve been running vulkan as well and have had no issues at all. 6800xt here.
jacawDigital Foundry did their own testing and found that DX11 is better most of the time, but in some CPU-limited situations you can get higher framerates with Vulkan. Performance differed a bit across hardware manufacturers. YMMV
RIP EVGA
ThayWiz GwarSuch a loss. I’m sure Vince will land on his feet. But it’s just hard to watch a brand evaporate like this.
ItsamelemmyI have a 5900x and a 2080S with 32G of ram. Vulcan triple buffering didn’t work and it crashed on me in my brief time trying it. DX11 has been fine mostly. No crashes, but after playing for a while I’ll occasionally just have my fps tank and start stuttering and have to quit the game and relaunch and it’ll be fine. Running basically ultra 4k dlss on balanced or performance. Tried both, both give me 60fps.
Wut, i have a 3080 and a i5 10600k. I get stable 100 fps without dlss on and everything else cranked up to max on 2k res. Why have dlss on at that point? If you run 4k i’ll understand.
I'm running it on a 4k TV with 120hz. Looks great.
I tried both and there is a late game fight with lots of NPCs that just murders my setup (5700X3D and 1070 Ti) on DX11 while the fight was fine on Vulkan. Since it’s quite late into the game, the reviewer probably didn’t come across this issue. Or my setup is just weird.
SirStumpsIt’s Kings like you that really make the world better. I will use your code to launch straight to the game.
I have found I have no game crashes with DX11 where I have had 3 with Vulkan and a computer blue screen on Vulcan.
I got to baldur’s Gates but I said huge stuttering issues. I’ve got a 3080 TI and no problems anywhere else in the game. I switch from direct x11 to Vulcan and had no more issues.
I’m loving the game don’t get me wrong but I wouldn’t say that polished is the word that I would describe it with.
The game is definitely buggy (I believe that playing split screen only makes this more apparent). That being said I don’t know how AAA games are usually shipped because I basically never buy them at launch (except CP2077 which I promptly refunded because that was a complete mess) so if they are usually much worse that is more that the whole industry standard has dropped down massively.
EA definitely helped but I wonder if Larian made the right choice by releasing it ahead of schedule. Maybe not, they are being praised massively for BG3, which is 100% an amazing game but imo it very much needs a patch or two still.
JackbyDevFolks aren’t ready to accept it but it’s true. I’m loving the game, I really am, and I even recommend it, but it really needs more polish. I guess the bar really is just that low for people. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills seeing everyone saying it’s perfect. A game can be great but still need polish.
Agreed, it’s a great game to the point that I’m willing to look past the jankiness, but there are some huge gaps right now. For examples, I have Asterion equipped with a finesse longsword and it seems like the sneak attack animation is missing, the game just hangs for 5 seconds and then computes damage every time.
Definitely buggy as shit, have had several issues straight halt progress, not to mention tons of hiccups with stuff like starting conversation. I’m having a blast and love this game, but it is still in EA as far as I’m concerned
Yeah I’m kind of baffled that I keep hearing about how polished it is - don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing game and my wife and I have been playing practically every night - but I don’t think a single night has passed yet where we haven’t run into a fairly major bug, and usually a whole shit load of minor ones
Just last night I went to withers to change my class, when halfway through the dialogue, Li’zael popped up with some random, unprompted dialogue, canceling my class change without refunding my 100g
day 01 of begging Larian to fix the Spell Sniper feat
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆The title is so clickbaity and dicksucking… The game is great in all areas except the polish. The amount of bugs is staggering, and almost all of them are not things you can easily ignore. It does not put AAA games to shame. It doesn’t even put AA games to shame.
Yeah, came here to say this.
The games content is pure gold. The weight of attacks and spells feel good, the sound design is great, but polish? None.
I’ve had bugs with the UI freezing, there’s awkward 15 seconds after every skill check where the game just sits there before saying success or fail, NPCs show up in weird places when you talk to them sometimes.
Great game, but not polished perfectly.
I don’t doubt your experience but there must be some other factor. I don’t see any of those problems you report.
I didn’t experience any of that the first part of Act 1 (early access, basically), but as I start to progress past that content, I certainly am starting to experience some of these issues. 15 second delays I can attest to. Running on Win10, Ryzen 7700X, 32GB, 4090 with separate OS and game NVMEs.
Ok interesting. I’ll see how things evolve, although I’m in no hurry to race through the game.
In no situation should anyone race through the game. I read about those poor few who had to “beat” the game opening weekend. You Won Nothing.
I just hope I don’t unexpectedly turn into a monster on the way
They were mentioned in the last community post by Larian so I guess that’s something?
Nothing besides the camera has been bad enough to break my experience tbf. Sometimes the camera gets stuck and I need to switch characters to make it behave again.
Some people have a higher tolerance for jankiness than I do also.
I think hardware probably contributes to it as well. My brother experiences occasional crashes, but it’s never crashed for me in 2x the amount of playtime.
Compared to other PC releases in recent years it might as well be perfect though lol.
dezmdI don’t mind if there’s no more polish if they allow me to export and import characters in multiplayer. BG1 and BG2 (and Icewind Dale 1 and 2) were both superior in that regard, along side LARGER PARTY sizes.
LeshoyadutI feel like the UX/UI also needs a lot of work. Tooltips missing important information, an inability to see what future levels in a class/subclass grant me (making it much more difficult to make an informed decision there), I can't view the inventory/character sheets of companions not currently in my party (requiring four steps of starting dialogue just to check items on a person and swap back to my original party member), a lack of explanation on how things are calculated or what your proficiency bonus is/comes from, etc. Not even counting the numerous visual bugs in the UI, or how the UI just seems oddly sluggish at times for no discernible reason.
I'm genuinely loving a ton of the game. But interacting with the interface is a constant low level annoyance that pulls me out of the experience just a bit all the time and noticeably detracts from my enjoyment as a result.
GreenAlexWife and I are loving it but it needs some tunning for sure. Performance struggles and crashes are pretty common, and my wife clipped through a door just after the tutorial section. Didn't do anything crazy, just walked right on through a locked door.
Crazy, haven’t experienced anything like that. Do you meet the minimum specs, and are you running it on an HDD or an SSD?
I3 12100f, gtx 1060 3gb, and ssd on Linux. We since switched to steam deck where we have only had 1 crash. I should be hitting a bit over the minimum specs but my bet is I was running out of vram in cutscenes where the detail is higher.
linux
There’s your answer,
Nah the game runs fine on SteamDeck, which is Linux.
4GB of VRAM is in the minimum requirements, seeing as you have a 12th gen Intel you really might want to look at getting a GPU upgrade, you can find used 6600/XT’s or 6700’s for pretty cheap used and that would roughly double (or more) your performance in pretty much every game.
That is a good catch, I clearly glossed over that. I recently gave most of my rig a facelift as I was bottlenecked by my old CPU. A GPU is 100% next in line.
Agreed on the tuning needed, but I’m surprised to hear how many have had crashes. I haven’t had a single crash in like 50 hours of playing and another 50hours with it idling while I take breaks.
Vulkan crashed on me on launch day. And haven't had a crash so since then with 30 hours of play now. I would play more but I work long hours during the week.
I agree it's odd. For some it's constant and others it's unheard of. Hopefully they're able to track it down. 3 patches since release is a good sign.
My cousin is having crashing but we realized she had her video settings too high for her pc to handle
I haven’t had any crashes, but I’ve had loads of other issues. Laezel constantly breaks requiring a reload, scripts sometimes don’t fire correctly so you don’t get an important buff or item necessary to progress, my characters constantly end up naked after going to camp because it wants to hide their armor automatically and doesn’t unhide it when you leave, my proficiencies are often not applied to rolls, etc.
Damn that sucks. I’ve had a few minor scripting issues and Shadowheart got legit stuck once, but other than that smooth sailing
I walked through a cracked stone wall when I tried to attack it.
Any game that
spoiler___has an owl bear and a dog become friends and playfully chase each other around gets an A+ in my book
AAA Executive 1: What could they have done to be so successful?! No fun micro transactions? No wacky costume packs? What was it?
AAA Executive 2: My second wife’s kid said something about a bear owl and cat playing tag was his favorite part.
AAA Executive 1: That’s it! Lets start pumping out bear cat tag DLCs and events for all our games!
Can I just say… what I find weird is how nobody who reviews BG3 makes any mention to Larian having developed the Divinity series, and particularly how Divinity Original Sin 2 seems to perfectly set up the framework for BG3?
Obviously, it’s a different game, but the Let’s Plays I’ve seen on YouTube are extremely reminiscent of Divinity. You’d think more comparisons would be made.
Some of the reviews I have read mentioned the Divinity series and that BG3 was built using the engine Larian made- Divinity 4.0 engine.
A lot of developers are using the Unreal Engine.
is this game any good for peeps who have never got into DnD or virtual turn based games?
I’ve never done any dnd but I did do some turn based games like xcom and civ so take it for what it’s worth. Me and my group are having a grand old time. It started off a little bit rough for me as a wizard and not really understanding how the math behind combat works but there is an in-game combat log that you can hover over that shows all your bonuses, what targets you need to hit, and what you rolled (typically, it will do the DnD dice rolls in the background for you). But not so rough that it wasn’t fun, just rough enough that I got really engaged in learning the system and mastering it. The really nice thing is that you can respec your character so if you are the type to get paralyzed by character creation, dont worry! use the recommended stats and as you naturally learn more about the game you can change them to better fit your style. I liked it enough that I started a solo run for when the group cant get together. I’d say if you are really interested in the story then solo is the best bet.
I think it needs to be said that even with some of the bugs and rare crashes, (I haven’t crashed yet in 100 hours but there have been times I thought it might, ymmv) they are almost inconsequential given the sheer depth of the game. I can forgive things like that when you just take into how many different ways you can engage with the content. I say almost because they are certainly there and you should definitely save before and after most encounters and very often, along with pruning your excess saves when the file gets too big.
Apart from that, this is GOTY easily.