Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck (1.0 release)

hello RPG fans Liam here with Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam deck one of the most popular releases this year by far with it seeing around half a million players jumping on release day all playing at the same time now I grew up playing through the likes of bounders gate 2 so this has actually been really exciting for me to see and I actually didn't jump in at all during Early Access I wanted to go in fully blind when it was done now before I get into all the nitty-gritty details there is a really important thing that you need to do you need to make sure you are running it with proton experimental valve still needs to do a fresh re-review of the game from when it was in Early Access by default it's using quite an old proton 7 which is actually pretty unstable with it so you'll need to go into the game properties into compatibility tick the box and then just select proton experimental and if you don't have it you can just search for proton experimental to install it in your steam library now out of the box I'll say I think the default Graphics settings that they put for Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam deck are actually pretty bad especially with the old FSR balanced giving it a really blurry picture I was really surprised the first time I saw it on the steam deck screen with their settings it was just bad I really don't know what they were thinking going with that to be honest I haven't really found any settings that will get it to stick to 30 FPS it's unfortunately quite a tough game for the steam deck to run at the moment to be fully clear I've seen plenty of areas that will go well above 30 FPS and at times I've seen 60 FPS but there's just far too many areas of exploration and combat that will bring it down well below 30 FPS pretty harshly and I'm not all that far into the game and I know from Friends there's many more intense areas to come I've no doubt there will be a few videos and articles out there cherry picking bits to make it look good but you know me by now if you're following along for a while I just show games truly as they are so with that in mind I'm not going to claim any best settings and I'm gonna have a quick moan here I really don't like the term best settings and anyone that does that because it's such a highly subjective thing based on what you want from it and the thing is games change constantly proton changes quite often the steam deck gets various software updates and so on all the time and lots of people use various different settings on the steam deck directly from Ram changes in BIOS to cryo utilities there's just so many things that can be different unless otherwise stated I'm always on stock settings with the stable update channel to give you the current real picture that the majority of you will actually be on but just as some basic early suggestions here are the settings that I'm currently using now just for the video it's at 720p just so I get the right format for YouTube but naturally all my other time has been at the normal 800p but it really doesn't actually make any performance difference I'm locking it down to 40 FPS since there are numerous areas that go above 30 FPS but I wouldn't go for anything higher than that because it really just can't handle it in many areas and does struggle I have the model quality on low detailed distance on low instance distance on medium to prevent a bit of popping texture quality on high texture filtering on trilinear animation level of detail on me medium I've also set Shadows clouds and fog down to low you really don't need them any higher than that AMD FSR is on Ultra quality with the sharpness up basically as high as it'll go anti-aliasing on TAA ambient occlusion is off depth of field is off and then God Rays Bloom and subsurface scattering are all turned off now that's just what I'm using which has been working well enough for me but not amazing the most important one is to change over FSR to ultra quality as without FSR turned on you see much worse sub 30 FPS drops that you can actually feel on the controls and you can see it it was rough but the default that the FSR is on which just gave it such a blurry picture so change that no matter what to ultra quality now I do have some good news though a silver lining perhaps because larion have said that they will be upgrading the AMD FSR implementation to version 2.2 which is a huge upgrade over what it has now and that should come on September 6th along with the console releases so that should in theory give us better performance with good picture quality so I am very hopeful on that and we'll be re-checking on the performance then as well but I'm still going to keep playing through anyway because it's Baldur's Gate 3 and it demands to be played the other good news of course is that this is turn-based combat with real-time exploration we really don't need 60 FPS here but getting it as close as we can to a locked 30 or 40 would be ideal because if you turn off the FPS counter which you should be doing for normal gameplay I think you'll thoroughly enjoy it anyway we all have a bit of a habit of focusing on that counter just a bit too much at times but in some cases you really do feel that low FPS in certain games but here it's kind of okay not great but okay now when it comes to controller support I think larion did a pretty good job here I actually really like the controller interface it feels like a good fit on the steam deck and I haven't had any trouble with that side of it thankfully testing it out docked with my 8-bit dough ultimate controller the only thing I needed to do was just to change the controller order in the steam decks Quick Settings menu to put it as number one and then it just worked fine as well so far I've been personally loving it but I do wish it performed better on Steam deck I can't stress the importance of having games like this run on release day on Steam deck it is awesome what valve have enabled the steam deck and Linux gaming as a whole with proton it just continues to amaze me remember again this is a game that was built for Windows running on a Linux system through a compatibility layer it can continues to blow my mind so if you have some preferred settings do be sure to share them in the comments I'm Keen to hear what you're all using and how you're getting on let me know what you think to the game itself as well are you enjoying it as much as I am what's your character set up I keep thinking I might start another save with a different character I want to try out everything there's so much and I loved playing with that character creator too it's really good a little piece of advice for you save early and save often as often as you can even with proton experimental running it quite well I have still had it crash where I did lose some progress a true lesson learned for me that quick save is your friend and you really should do it constantly to ensure you're not stuck like me having to redo a major battle which is such a big freaking nuisance and it really did annoy me quite a bit hopefully we'll see a mixture of gameplay matches and proton upgrades to help smoothen out some of those rough edges and also don't forget to pet the dog yes you can pet the dog in Baldur's Gate 3 which instantly gives this game a few extra points from me jokes aside there's so many events defined spread throughout the world my other tip is to make sure you do plenty of off-track exploration outside of your quests because some of the little events are quite surprising and really fun and all the writing in this game is simply amazing I love all the inter-character interactions it's just fantastic either way be sure to like comment subscribe and help out your friendly neighborhood Decker but that's it for my brief early thoughts to get word out there about running it on Steam deck so it works but performance certainly could be better thanks for watching steam Pals and I'll see you later

Channel: GamingOnLinux

Views: 29,477

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Id: KJqkto37uCM

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023