Baldur's Gate 3 PC Optimized Settings and Performance Testing

Baldur's Gate 3 seems to have some very reasonable system requirements and I wasn't originally going to investigate this game because it didn't seem that hard to run but I think it might be interesting to look at on older hardware and maybe give some optimized settings if we can figure out which graphic settings do you tweak for the biggest bang for the buck now uh also I mean this game has just been smashing steam records and all that so I do think a lot of people might be uh busting out their old gaming PC is it gonna run so uh anyway I'm gonna take a look at uh the closest thing I have to their system requirements here they have a GTX 970 as the recommended graphics card and they are claiming four gigabytes plus of vram for the minimum requirement now I don't have a 970 but I'm what I'm showing you here is the tech power up relative performance chart and if you click on the 970 is the Baseline here I do have a 1066 gigabyte which is similar but a little bit faster also has a little bit more vram but we can actually investigate the vram usage make sure you'll be okay on that and then we can also try out some other gpus if we feel like it's going to be useful once we see how the 1060 is performing and then when it comes to CPUs I don't have anything as old as the I5 4690 or FX 8350 however I do have a 16 gigabyte system with an i5 9600k which is fairly similar to the 8700k that they recommend although the 8700k is a 6 core 12 thread CPU from a one generation behind the 9600k the 9600k is six cores one generation newer but only has six threads um and if you look at the Boost clocks the 8700k does go a bit uh a bit beyond that so basically I'm going to be looking at a system that is slightly above the minimum GPU but below the recommended GPU and slightly uh I guess probably slightly below the recommended CPU let's hop in on that system first and see if we can dial in some good settings and then see if it makes sense to take a look at some other gpus the game actually defaults to ultra settings on the GTX 1060 but that gets us around 38 frames per second and to be honest you know this not a super fast paced you know shooter game or anything like that you might be completely fine with these settings however I've noticed that there's a lot you can do here again we're at 1080p on the 1066 gigabyte here and again defaulted to ultra settings but what could we tweak here well first thing I want to point out is that if you just go all the way down to low settings you will go over 60 frames per second but I don't think it's optimal you'll see here that we're now around you know 66 frames per second you can see like that the Shadows look very flickery uh we we lack a lot of anti-aliasing I I just don't feel like this is the optimal way to boost settings so I have been doing a lot of isolating of individual settings and their impact uh to see where we're at because again low doesn't look that great if you go to medium you know you're around 50 52 frames per second things don't look too bad so honestly the medium preset is by no means terrible and you could just go with that but I think you can actually leave a lot more stuff up uh than um than just doing the medium preset overall so we're gonna go back to the ultra preset and then first thing I'm going to do is drop model quality but I want you guys to get the Baseline so we can see the impact each setting has here so we're at 38 frames per second so let's see uh as we change a few settings how much uh we can boost things so going from model quality High to model quality low which you can see on the tool tip over here adjust the amount of triangles available for the geometry that things are built out of we gain a few frames per second we went from about 38 up to about 41 42 so we're gaining a bit but in and of itself that's not going to be quite uh enough to get to the frame rate that I'd be looking for here so another one that I found is uh can have a very large impact probably even larger is Shadow quality and if we drop shadow quality down to low the Shadows still look reasonably good and you'll notice that we're now up to 52 frames per second almost 53 so in other words we're getting about the same frame rate we were on the by dropping everything down to medium uh by actually just changing the model quality to low and the Shadows to low and now everything's still uh boosted quite significantly overall uh performance wise now the downside is that all of the other ones I feel like our are less impactful now in certain scenes uh the fog can be fairly impactful I'm not sure if I'm in a scene um right now where it is but you could drop fog quality down to low and depending on your scene this can make a bit of a difference as well looks like we're up to around 55 56 now uh so again with fawn quality low Shadows to low and model quality to low I think we actually look better than the medium preset and a lot better than the low preset and we're actually fairly close to 60 frames per second as we're running around now uh which I think is pretty interesting but if you want to get that last little bit you can turn a bunch of stuff down or if you're just on a much weaker GPU because again you might not have the 1060. uh another extremely impactful setting is resolution scaling now unfortunately this game only has FSR 1.0 at this point in time it does also have dlss but if you're on an older GPU um uh you don't have uh you know a GTX GPU not RTX you won't have option to dlss however if you uh go to the ultra quality setting this is going to render the game below 1080P and then upscale and sharpen uh to try to make it look close to a native 1080p now in my opinion it still doesn't but you'll notice that we get a very large boost in performance here but you'll notice the details on the characters are a bit low but one another thing I really like on this though is now do you guys see that watch the frame rate as we're in this top down view we're at over 70 frames per second here but you can also go into a close-up view and I think a lot of people playing on a controller might actually use this type of view uh more frequently okay and we're actually able to still manage around 60 frames per second uh using the ultra quality FSR 1.0 however when you look at characters faces things like that um I do want to switch it off again so so you can tell that there is a bit of loss uh to detail on this all right let's go to video settings that's where it was um if we switch this off uh you'll notice again now we're below 60 frames per second in this type of scene but I do think there is more noticeable detail uh on the characters and small details but again if you're on a GPU or you need a bigger boost of performance uh beyond the settings that I already showed you I really do think that uh FSR is going to be where you're going to get those those last big boosts and um you can go beyond the ultra quality setting although personally if you're at a resolution like 1080p I start to feel like beyond that setting it really gets to a very questionable image quality like you can go all the way down to the Quality setting you see now our frame rate's up around like 85 in this cut scene um uh you know we're over UH 60 when we're in in this more demanding kind of viewpoint uh top down we're up in the 70s but again I really think that you're starting at a pretty low base resolution here um you you can go all the way like if you really need performance though if you do switch to Performance mode if you're on a very a much older system uh you can see that there's a lot of performance to be had here uh going down to that setting here here you can see I'm up up to 90 frames per second or so here uh but things are looking quite blurry you can see the face is mostly blurred out here um so not my preferred setting but if you're on an older GPU uh that's certainly a place that you can get um quite a bit of performance back and again uh if we switch that off you can see there's a lot more detail available on the character faces things like that but here we are down around um uh 50 frames per second in that scene but again from a top-down perspective uh my original optimization settings do get us fairly close to 60 frames per second and if you're the kind of person going for like a locked 60 frames per second uh you like I said you could go for the FSR Ultra quality and then now if I did want to go to uh you know uh let's say we were on a 60 hertz display uh this will probably blank out the video for just a second sorry guys so 60 hertz uh display uh we could v-sync on and I think we're going to be able to get a nice 60fps locked experience uh which would get us a really nice uh smooth frame time graph and all that and apparently uh we're getting into a conversation scene and and all of that I'm going to try out some other gpus just to see where we're at all right now I've swapped in the RX 6600 from AMD one reason I chose this it is very close to the recommended gpus which I don't actually own the 5700 XT in the 2060 super it's an eight gigabyte GPU we're showing 1080p right now and again at the ultra settings and the good news is this time well and this top down sort of view it looks like we are around 80 frames per second uh when I go into this closer Viewpoint um it looks like we are over 60 frames per second and so overall I think it looks like really you can pretty much just do the ultra settings on this card and um the good news also is this GPU brand new is as low as 180 dollars recently I think 200 is what I saw today so if you are wanting to upgrade to a GPU that can handle this 1080p maxed out I think this one's showing a very good promise now of course you could still do some of those tweaks especially remember Shadow quality was very impactful if we went down uh to low settings on that we're actually now close to 100 frames per second uh we are getting a little stutter in the frame time graph I am noticing the CPU usage is is fairly High here so that could be related uh but again you could set a frame rate limit that kind of thing to try to even that out wherever you're uh you're pretty stable um but yeah overall it looks like uh the RX 6600 just uh does a great job at ultra settings 1080p even as we look at more difficult scenes I'm gonna go back to the ultra setting uh but what if you're wanting to play at 1440p on this GPU things might get a bit more difficult so why don't we test that out we're going to bump up to 2560 by 1440 uh sorry the video will probably disappear for just a second there so 1440p ultra settings top down view we're actually in the mid 50s it's not bad at all and you could totally play the game like this uh zooming into closer cameras looks like we're kind of down in the mid 40s but the good news is here I think that again just a few minor tweaks should probably get us where we need to be like I showed already Shadow quality is one of the real big ones if I put that down to low our top down view now with a good good a bit of stuff on the screen is very close to around 60 frames per second here and if I did want to also lower um fog quality and model quality to low as I already showed earlier were some more impactful settings we're now over 70 frames per second in this kind of top down view sort of scene and we can zoom in the camera a bit here and we are right around 60. so overall we're getting a good um a good performance here on the RX 6600 which is good news to see even at 1440p which means I think the last thing we'll look at is let's just try to Max this thing out on an RTX 4090 because I mean honestly already we've shown that the game's not super demanding even on Modest Hardware so what is the most powerful Hardware look like all right now I put in the RTX 4090 and my 7800x 3D based system here so basically the fastest kind of gaming PC you can build right now I'm looking at 4K resolution uh Ultra preset all of that and the good news is it looks like we're at like 140 something frames per second in the top down view if we go in close for this type of view we can drop below 120 frames per second um but you know it's still a very good experience uh now if you did want to make sure you were still over 120 frames per second well what could we do um well if we actually we're going back over it again apparently it's just too easy of a game but I I was going to mention that if you are on an RTX GPU you do get access to dlss in this game uh which would be a good way to boost performance jump down to dlss Quality and you can get a performance boost here you can see now I'm up over 160 frames per second uh on on that kind of a scene and here we're uh you know going up over 200 or around 200 or so um now another thing is if you have too much horsepower on the GPU um again this game actually also has dlaa so if you're not using dlss to upscale you could set the um the anti-alias setting setting to dlaa which can look better than TAA sometimes a little bit less blurry um but it does have a bit of a performance hit but if you have a lot of extra performance to work with uh then you're probably good to go on this and yeah so overall this game seems to run well even on Old hardware and then if you do have a high-end PC uh you can scale things up to 4K resolution and all that don't think I have too much else to say about it uh so hopefully you guys found this video useful if you needed to tweak a few settings or interesting if you're just curious how uh how things were running on various pieces of Hardware I would usually check check out more mid-range stuff but we saw it was already doing really well on an RX 6600 um I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 56,702

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Id: uy8zgD_ai6Q

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023