Baldur's Gate 3: Best Settings - Digital Foundry Optimised

optimize settings in Baldur's Gate are a bit different than it is in other titles that is because the game is not exactly very heavy in the first place on Modern CPUs and gpus maxed out at 1440p with the most expensive option selected on an RTX 2060 super a four-year-old mid-range GPU the game would typically find itself in the 50s in the Overworld with the worst being seen in those cutscene Laden moments with depth of field driving the FPS down to around 40. all this while the game is using just a bit over 4.5 gigabytes of vram really at most yes that's all while maxed out at 4040p while using dx11 so unlike many other modern games ported to the PC this kind of PC first game has very fair vram usage for its generally competent texture quality you're getting this much performance on an old GPU at 1440p while maxed out and I think that's actually really great great and activating something like dlss and quality mode will then just lift that GPU up to a level where it's going to be at a stable 60 FPS pretty much almost anywhere that's really great in my book still not everyone has a GPU of this caliber I guess or access to dlss since there is no fsr2 here so after my settings are definitely called for still as such I've gone through the settings to give you a sense in the audience of which ones you can tweak down that offer the best bang for the buck without compromising visual quality first starting with fog quality this option reduces the resolution of the game's volumetric fog barely showing noticeable differences at high for example for a nice two percent performance win in this scene but it can actually be much higher in others but as you go down to medium or low as we can see here the sharpness of the Shadows in that fog noticeably lessen changing the artistic intent I would say in spite of a near five percent better performance at low here I recommend high for optimized settings next there's Shadow quality here going down the medium will affect Shadow crispness and resolution but it offers a substantial uplift in performance nearly 10 percent there going down to medium going down low increases performance a little bit more but starts having obvious issues and Shadow aliasing and removes smaller Shadows from things like foliage so it's definitely not worth it here I recommend medium Shadows for optimized settings then comes depth of field first you can change the type of depth of field to gaussian or turning it off and in my measurements it really only helps by turning it off but I think that negatively affects artistic intents so I don't recommend changing it there's another adaptive field option which changes how circular depth of field is filtered as we see here turning the option down to remove the denoising step as it's called sees a nice three percent performance increased well depth of field is on screen and the visual difference is a slight bit of instability in the circular depth of field like you can see here so I recommend that quarter option without denoising for my recommended settings after this recommended settings are mostly about preserving visual detail and we can see that with instance quality and this will affect the density of vegetation like grass and it noticeably reduces the amount of vegetation close to the camera even on medium settings with a lackluster 2.5 performance increase in this scene here in my opinion this is too much of a loss for the visuals for the performance gained so I recommend high for my optimized settings I feel similarly about the model quality setting here going down to medium will noticeably increase pop in and you'll see a reduction of quality at a distance for models like here check out the Boulder and the base of the tree they're rather noticeably degraded at medium and lower the uptick in performance is somewhat hard to ignore with that six percent better performance at medium so I will say use high as a base for most gpus but if you find yourself dropping frames in a way that you're not happy with well then go down to medium the other settings in the menu are nice to see and perhaps are great for scaling down to the ultra low end like 10 year old gpus for example but in my experience here scaling is limited for Modern Hardware for example that detail setting in my experience you may see minor reductions in draw detail at a distance Within being turned down but really only very minor increases in performance best left at the highest quality same with Cloud quality you can see this technically affecting the quality of clouds making them less accurately rendered so they become more diffused by getting those clouds to be visible in normal game camera angles is going to be very rare and even then the performance increase while they are on screen as we see here is not exactly large so once again unless there's a late game moment here where you dance in the clouds or something I would keep this one just at Ultra Beyond this there are two other settings that I think require mentioning first is animation quality and I really couldn't find a meaningful visual difference when looking for it perhaps this affects some areas of the game I could not find or it is a small difference either way when GB limited there was no performance difference at all when CPU Limited at a much lower resolution I did measure a few percentage better performance at the lower settings so if it is working then it is doing something but that performance increase I did measure is not exactly great so I would just keep this one at high I'll other than that there's the slow HDD streaming option now usually I would just ignore this as you shouldn't really be gaming off an HDD in the year 2023 but I was intrigued by its description text where it says that it's front loading more of the game's assets into system memory and vram to reduce streaming regardless of having a hard drive this option actually makes a lot of sense on PC forget not PCS are different than consoles where there's a minimal shared pool of ram that needs constant paging to the disk on console on PC you can potentially have a lot more vram and system Ram to be streaming from instead of from the disk so if you can reduce the amount of streaming from the disk by preloading it more that makes a lot of sense for PC based design sadly I couldn't find any positive behavior while turning this on while using an SSD there was potentially a small amount of more vram or system Ram being used while running around in this Coast side town here but the effect on performance was invisible over the average run both runs of the game with the option an on or off we're within margin of error of one another so this idea on paper sounds nice and it is a way I would like to see PCS being used in the future as more system and vram becomes available but in the meantime this is a niche option with little benefit if your PC is using an SSD as it really should be lastly you have texture quality and like I just mentioned at the beginning of this optimize settings segment I see little reason for anyone with a decently modern GPU to worry about this setting perhaps if you have four gigabytes or less vram on your GPU you could consider medium texture quality but if you have six or above you're going to be fine at Ultra at high resolutions with no issues and with that being said we have our optimized settings it's mostly high or Ultra here since the game is so light in general but with a few tweaks and there's also that model quality setting which I recommend to be at high but if you're unhappy with your performance then drop that down to medium for a potentially good win when using my optimized settings in an average scene like this one here you can see around nice twenty percent average performance increase which is nice indeed to see for such a little visual difference

Channel: DF Clips

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Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023