Baldur's Gate 3 PC - DF Tech Review - Graphics Analysis + Optimised Settings

[Music] larian Studios Baldur's Gate 3 has left a long Early Access period to critical Acclaim and massive success and after playing it I can understand why Baldur's Gate 3 digitizes the free-form gameplay of Dungeons and Dragons in a way that keeps the spirit of that tabletop role-playing game intact which results in some of the most interactive and reactive narrative gameplay that the medium has ever seen it also is using its own engine technology which is admirable from a studio and an era where even the largest and most colossal AAA studios are giving up on pursuing their own bespoke Tech and instead opting to use Unreal Engine in today's video I will talk about the visuals and performance of Baldur's Gate 3 and give you in the audience of good idea of what PC you might need to run this game at optimize settings now before I get into the menu like how I usually start a video it is apt to talk about the game and the visuals on display here for the game it is Dungeons and Dragons the tabletop role-playing game in a near Pitch Perfect digital form I last more regularly played DND more than 10 years ago at this point yet I was astounded how well Baldur's Gate 3 marries that analog experience with a digital one so much is done right here between the tone and the mechanical way that the tabletop experience is implemented whether that is the overt way the games master narration sneaks into moments the blood in your head drums and pounds pounding blood obscures Who You Are an overwhelming loss of memory or the way you navigate the environment in encounters utilizing environmental dressing and player attributes to come out Victorious it's all free form and flows wonderfully and the amount of choice you have to affect the game in your own way is staggering and I can really not even put that into words one of my favorite aspects is how laryn has Blended in specific analog things from that tabletop experience where it matters most in combat the rules of chance are dealt with automatically in a digital way to keep combat fast and satisfying as much as as possible in a turn-based system but when it comes to Big moments of player action like in the tabletop game chance is made overt with an analog throw of D20 die that you can see spinning right in front of you your fate left up to it if you've ever played tabletop games then you know how exhilarating this is how empowering it is to see a natural 20 and how hilarious it is to see a critical failure larion keeping this in is golden and as I see it Baldur's Gate 3 is the best translation of that d d tabletop experience into the digital realm that I've ever played Whispers to me kill kill and kill again from a technical graphical perspective the game is admittedly though nothing special in many ways the technicals on display here are similar to what you would see in a last generation PS4 game there are Shadow Maps screen space ambient occlusion and just enough texture and geometric detail to make convincing facsimiles of all the famous archetypes and objects you can find in d d lore the technical makeup is indeed last gen but the execution is great nonetheless I would say characters look great and animate well especially in dialogue which is surprising giving the amount of voice over work in the game here special effects from attacks are fanciful and detailed and yes the areas you Traverse through can be particularly evocative and beautiful given how this game is shipping with a Vulcan client I really would have loved to have seen some of its graphical quality being upped in meaningful ways with that API for example the ssao in the game is Just ho-hum replacing that indirect shadowing with a ray traced variant or even Ray traced Global illumination of some sort would do magical things to the game's presentation even something as simple as Ray Trace Shadows would help the game out a bit as Shadows even on their highest settings can be lacking showing obvious flicker or aliasing but that's really all I have to say about the graphics they're good enough but that really isn't what the game is about now I was just talking about Vulcan before this and before I get into the menu I want to talk to you about which API you should use in this game as the choice for your API happens before you ever get into the game in the lyrion launcher that pops up when you click to play that is if the launcher works for you on my one test PC with the ryzen 5 3600 this launcher loads quickly and responds well to my inputs it's not a nuisance on my much more powerful core I9 12900k machine while the launcher is unresponsive and takes an eternity to do anything I have no idea why of course but that is the experience that I have so if you're in a a similar boat is that 12900k I recommend going to the PC gaming Wiki and entering the launch parameters that you can find there into steam or Gog to skip the larion launcher and go directly into game with the graphics API of your choice so what is the graphical API of your choice here dx11 or Vulcan for NVIDIA Hardware when GPU limited as in when your GPU utilization is at 99 or above the dx11 renderer will run around 8 percent faster in a like for like seen as we're seeing here it's hard to beat nvidia's dx11 driver when GPU limited so it's not a surprise on AMD there was no measured advantage to running either API when in a GPU limited scenario so both showed that same FPS average so if your GPU limited on AMD as we see here it would appear both apis are pretty equal on Intel with me testing on the arc a770 Vulcan managed to be an astounding 20 slower when GPU limited versus dx11 this surprised me as Intel is notorious currently for being better at dx12 and Vulcan then dx11 and lower wins CPU limited as and when your GPU utilization is below 99 the story is a bit more complex in a perfectly static scene as we saw before devoid of NPCs both AMD and Nvidia will see the Vulcan API running around 22 percent faster this makes sense as the lower level Vulcan API will be most likely bottlenecked by draw calls in such a scene and Vulcan does these things better than dx11 for Intel at the lowest possible resolution I could run the a770 was 29 faster when CPU limited versus dx11 in Vulcan so all GPU vendors will run the game better in such circumstances under Vulcan when CPU limited but this performance Advantage for Vulcan only applies to scenes with low amounts of NPCs when you get into a populated town area like I'm showing here or in a combat NPC calculations become the most expensive CPU process most likely and when CPU Limited in such MPC driven moments like this run through the town here that we're seeing on screen as you can see that both Vulcan and dx11 are going to perform much more similarly with dx11 actually taking a lead in average frame rate as I found three to five percent depending upon the configuration in such scenes both apis will show a similar level of frame time stability with small hitches occurring at similar moments as the areas traversed around NPCs both on Nvidia and on AMD Hardware it should be noted that AMD Hardware in dx11 and Vulcan produce less clean frame times than Nvidia or Intel under these apis whether being large recorded spikes on AMD that were not there on other vendors for example I recorded a really large 270 millisecond stutter on AMD while doing this run under Vulcan which never at all happened on Intel or Nvidia but that's the story on Nvidia and AMD Intel showed different results in this Benchmark where it actually had an average frame rate lead of 13 for Vulcan when CPU limited so the situation is like I said not so clear-cut as to which API you should use I recommend most AMD and Nvidia users use the dx11 API especially as your CPU becomes more modern dx11 offers better GPU performance on Nvidia and the CPU advantages that Vulcan has do not universally apply to moments where it might matter most like when there's a lot of NPCs on screen dx11 also has some other positives working in its favor triple buffering actually works in dx11 where it doesn't at all work in Vulcan instead just having full screen tearing similarly will Judd at digital Foundry also experience multiple Vulcan related crashes while playing the game that he did not get while playing in dx11 so Vulcan is perhaps a bit buggy at the moment maybe if you have a very old CPU and you're struggling to attain 60fps and even the most mundane moments then dx11 is perhaps not your choice and Vulcan could be better but I think for most average users the X11 is going to be the best all-rounder for stability and bug-free enjoyment on AMD and Nvidia if you are an Intel GPU user the API decision is harder if you're playing the game in a GP Limited way at a high resolution targeting performance of around 60fps then the API of choice I think is going to be dx11 if you're targeting performance of 120 FPS at lower resolutions then Vulcan is maybe the better choice now with that API question out of the way I can get into the menu and talk about the technical user experience on PC for Baldur's Gate 3. the options in Baldur's Gate 3 are good not perfect but not bad you have General descriptions of what each option does as well as usually an accompanying image of the visual change you can expect this can suffice usually but I still think there's some room for an improvement here for example which PC sub-component is taxed most by each setting would be useful CPU GPU or vram also technically the game allows you to change the graphics in real time with no issues as far as I can tell so perhaps they can make the background menu go transparent for those moments when you actually change a setting so you could see it changing in real time as for the settings themselves they are useful as I will talk about later in the optimize settings section but there are some key things that are are still missing I would say I'm grateful to see dlss and dlaa here but not every user has an RTX graphics card the game really should have launched with at least having fsr2 officially in and preferably using streamline to get xcss easily in there for Intel users right now you have access to fsr1 if you're not on an RTX GPU which as we know is not really good if you run it with similar performance to dlss you can just see how woefully inadequate its image quality is it's just dreadful for a desktop class components fsr2 here at least would be a viable alternative and the game really should have shipped with it at launch as I see it instead of one month after release as has been announced by larion as for that dlss and dla quality it's good here in balder ca3 it uses an older version but has a lot of positive aspects I generally think it looks better than the game's TAA at nearly every preset even at lower resolutions where it offers much less blur in the image and it also has less ghosting in World element such as on these particles here which are ghosty with TAA on but with dlaa or dlss for that matter they'll be nice and crisply rendered there are two dlss issues though that I noticed one is that hair in particular can have a little bit of trailing going on behind it when in front of depth of field giving it an unstable appearance another issue occurs with the game's depth of field and I think it's perhaps a developer oversight essentially the lower your dlss internal resolution is the less depth of field is visible because the focal plane is changing objects that are closer in the background become clearer the lower the dlss mode is this is a typical in dlss implementations but it is something to be aware of if you're a fan of the game's more cinematic dialogue sequences altogether I would say the technical user experience in Baldur's Gate 3 is good the options are adequate and you even get some nice things like the entire games UI and camera style changing when you use a mouse or keyboard or a controller that is some intense dedication to have the game have such a different UI when doing that still I would like to see some improvements such as dlss issues being cleared up and of course fsr2 being in the game as quickly as possible 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 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 60fps 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 to medium will have 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 in 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 intense so I don't recommend changing it there is 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 performs 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 instant 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 gain 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 with it 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 GPU 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 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 pre-loading 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 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 here around a nice 20 percent average performance increase which is nice indeed to see for such a little visual difference [Music] getting to the end of the video here I will conclude by saying Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game on PC and unlike many PC releases as of late it does have very few issues it is polished and I think it almost shames the technical quality of other big AAA releases I have seen I wish it did a few things better like having fsr2 at launch and as I showed off in the API segment Vulcan is a bit of a question mark here and there can technically be some less than awesome frame times when running around the NPC populated areas like we can see here on a ryzen 5 3600 where the frame times there while CP limited show the game having issues if possible I would love to see such npc-laden moments of the game have better frame time stability even on mid-range older CPUs but other than those few aspects I will say larion has done a darn good job here if you did like this video hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video other than that support us on patreon to get years worth of our content in high quality for download comment below follow on Twitter and as always this is Alex in foreign

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 314,428

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Id: V9Kc8025H7U

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Acrobatic_Internal_2]

That frametime on Vulkan...

For me DX11 is also 10-12 fps faster and to think all this time I was leaving a lot of performance on the table because of Vulkan

[u/HorrorScopeZ]

I wonder if there will be an addition when/if they make it to the city. Some of those settings could become much more pronounced.

[u/LlamaNL]

Act 3 is super heavy load wise. My 5950x / RTX 3090 only does 45 fps in the city. Settings maxed out only DLSS set to Quality.

EDIT: 3440x1440

[u/M337ING]

Text: Baldur's Gate 3 PC tech review: polish that puts other AAA games to shame

[u/Paul_cz]

I am playing on 5800X3D and 3080Ti in 1620p with DLSS quality and settings maxed out with 60hz vsync, and my GPU is eating only about 110W (instead of 350W of its TDP), generally running at around 800Mhz. I have yet to see a single framedrop. But I am not in the city yet, in fact after 50 hours I am still in act one (although almost done). Great game!

[u/Grx]

Anyone else had to turn off DLSS (quality) because of the TERRIBLE hair shimmering? Is there a remedy for this?

[u/FishPhoenix]

2080 Super, 9700k, 1440p ultrawide. Getting around 70fps on a mix of high/medium settings with DLSS on Quality, but I do get fairly frequent drops into the 50s. It's not too bothersome given the type of game, but it annoying when it happens during traversal. May need to try DLSS on balanced or performance. Also I've only tried DX11, have not even attempted Vulkan. For what it's worth, my GPU/CPU combo has been struggling on most new releases this year on ultrawide.

I'm sure if I were to swap to my non-ultrawide monitor it'd be running pretty well.

[u/AntiqueSoulll]

People are just debating over API but you should wait and see the Act 3 :D It is just stutterfest. I just dropped the game in Act 3 (city part).

I tried everything. Re-installing the game, drivers, ddu, different drivers, vulkan, dx11, all in game settings set to low, different resolutions, DLSS, FSR, disabling launcher ...

My 5800x and 3080 aren't even used to half of their potentials. Cpu sits %20-30, Gpu sits %40-70. 32 gb ram and nvme ssd btw. Frametime graph is all over the place.

[u/alcaste19]

I'm playing on a budget build and getting... I don't even want to know. Bad frames on medium settings.

But I don't care. The game is turn based, the voice acting is great, and I get to be a... Nevermind.