Baldur's Gate 3 Best Settings and Optimization for Steam Deck

greetings my friends and welcome to another video from your favorite space pirate dread Captain James in today's video we're going to talk about balers Gate 3 and how it runs on the steam deck it's a steam deck verified title so theoretically it should run pretty well but some people have reported that it looks terrible so what we're going to do is take a look at the default settings right out of the box and then I'm going to show you what I found to improve upon those and give you a better experience that being said as you know it's that time let's Jump Right In and get to Some solid D and D goodness of course you know I'm going to show you the PC side of things and use that as our control group I've got to show you the best as that's what we are going to be aiming for in our results notice up in the leftand corner I've got our frame rate which is a solid 60 FPS due to the capture card but that should give you an idea of what we're looking to achieve I picked three different saves to show off one of them is in a dungeon which makes sense as it is in fact Dungeons and Dragons the second is at Emerald Grove which is much harder on the frame rate and the third is at the goblin Camp which has a ton of movement and Reflections as you can see in all three scenarios the PC is a pretty rock solid 60fps with minor deviations just above and below the target 60 all settings are set to ultra and dlss is disabled this is a beautiful experience so with this in mind let's go ahead and see what the steam deck has in store for us what I'm showing you first is what the steam deck sets as your default there is an autod detect option in the display menu and when you do this it gives you the settings for the best possible frame rate in our dungeon we get an FPS in the 70s which is great but the visual uals or where it has taken its blood sacrifice that being said it doesn't look terrible in handheld mode but it is still something I don't prefer as I can see the blurriness and that just bothers me I will always take better quality picture over frame rate especially in a game that is this pretty now as we move over to the emerald Grove FPS is in the 30s and 40s this spot is particularly rough on FPS as mentioned by before and out in the open you can see again how everything just appears to be out of focus again handheld mode is fine here but plugged into a TV or a monitor this is a glaring contrast to our PC control just as a little aside I did not actually film any handheld mode as it wasn't necessary when we get to actually comparing the docked versions that's where a lot of detail is going to be shown your and then lastly in the goblin camp in my opinion this one suffers the most as we have lost a lot of fidelity on the reflections which really make the scene amazing to look at FPS is 30s to 40s once again and it does run smoothly but at the cost of so much detail zoomed in or out the loss of detail here is staggering and even faces are just a blur of pixels without much definition so what's the bottom line is this playable will yeah is it enjoyable it depends on the player but for me no I would much rather see more detail at the cost of frames than a blurry experience that maxes out the highest number possible so let's get on over to the solution and I'll show you how I got there so here's the point where I decided I wanted to have my cake and eat it too and this is where I got kind of creative and as you might guess it did take a while but this is is the happiest Middle Ground I think I could come up with and even though it is a bit of a compromise I think it ends up being a decent experience here's what you can actually expect 25 to 30 FPS average and stable Ultra texture detail great lighting great Reflections and overall a much better experience with all of that considered so how did I get us here here's the set it's going to start with your steam deck to begin with you're going to go to the performance section of your steam deck and scroll down to thermal power limit or TDP turn it on and set it to 12 you can realistically mess with that number just a little bit but this is going to help keep your temperatures down while still giving you lots of power scroll down to the scaling filter and set it all the way to FSR it should automatically set to five which is fine now you can go ahead and launch the game and get into a save or do this from the main menu it doesn't really matter either way go to options and then video make sure vsync is turned off then under quality set the overall preset to ultra I know this is nuts but go with me here and you'll see why then immediately after you've done that move up to AMD FSR 1.0 and set it to off it's going to ask you to confirm each time you change it so keep confirming next you're going to want to scroll down and set your Shadow quality to low then after that you're going to want to go to Cloud quality and set that to low below that instance detail set that to medium below that fog quality and set that to low next is detail distance and set that to me medium animation level of detail is also going to get set to medium and make sure anti- aling is set to TAA everything else at this point you can just go ahead and leave alone it's all fine once you have all that feel free to pause the video rewind it and get all of those correct but once you have all that take a step back get out of your menus and look at what you've done in our dungeon we're getting between 35 and 45 FPS and in my opinion I think it's looking so much better if not great no blurry characters no missing faces Reflections in the blood and on the floors and lighting that looks natural there are still imperfections don't get me wrong but they are much less noticeable now and this really looks great in handheld mode at Emerald Grove the FPS definitely takes a hit sitting in the mid 20s mostly but it's definitely playable and it looks much better than before again our characters are detailed and look great the terrain is sharp and looks fantastic and lighting is on point especially as we go under the bridge this is a great example of why I would rather take a hit to the FPS for the sake of detail lastly the goblin Camp you want to join the chase the goblin Camp is the ultimate Sellar of this method I think Reflections on the floor are crisp and realistic especially seeing the fire reflecting off the puddles lots of movement happens everywhere in the camp and the deck maintains around 30 FPS for the most part admittedly there are some drops into the 20s but they quickly restore themselves leaving the camp and heading out to look at the waterfall drives at home though this is definitely the set of settings I would recommend for a beautiful experience experience if you're going to be playing on deck if you're looking for super smooth just click that auto detect mode and enjoy it being a much higher FPS but for me I need to see these visuals more than I need the frame rate also there's a smallest side here if you play in desktop mode you can adjust the resolution of the game and I was able to set it up to 1920 by 1080 using this setting it was necessary to turn on triple buffering and set FSR in game to ultra quality but once I did that the results were pretty good I would still recommend playing this in game mode as this took another slight hit to the frame rates but it's really cool that it could do it at all all right so here you go that's what I came up with I tested a lot and these settings each time were the best that I could come up with now this is not modded and I haven't done anything that someone who hasn't just bought the game and installed it couldn't do so nothing fancy here modding the game and using FPS mods on the steam deck is another thing entirely the purpose of this video was to solely show what could be done out of the box just for a little disclaimer on this entire video that being said I'd love to hear what you think and how to squeeze out a little more performance of The Humble steam deck this little piece of Hardware is one of the coolest things and it's very powerful for its size and price so seeing what it can do has been a lot of fun and seeing it perform time and time again is really encouraging for those of us that like to Game On The Go all right well that is basically it thank you for watching this video this far and I really hope you found it to be helpful if you haven't yet I'd really appreciate a thumbs up on the video and a sub to the channel so you know when more videos are coming out little actions like that are really helpful when it comes to pushing through the YouTube algorithm and it means a lot so thank you if you did that all right that's all I got for this video I hope it helps you in your questing and dung engineering and I hope you have a blast playing balers Gate 3 thank you again and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dread Captain James

Views: 6,374

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Id: rOAhwtZ7rAE

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023