Baldur's Gate 3 Performance Review - PC vs Steam Deck

foreign Dungeons and Dragons is the Pinnacle of Fantastical tabletop RPG adventuring without question new to the dungeon and Dragon World at least developers larion studios are opening the gate a third time in this Unforgettable realm dropping the more complex ad rules set the original Boulder's Gate title used from 98 Origins to the early 2000s powered by their own dfinity 4 engine supporting dual apis in DirectX 11 and Vulcan a vast cast of characters and stories to tell for clan multiplayer and groundbreaking Split Screen Co-op and more so let's roll the IGN performance review Dice and see if the numbers equal success as a deep evolving and branching game based on your actions affecting how and what happens within the gigantic challenge this presents on narrative animation assets Etc needs to be taken into account within the technical areas of the game systemic game systems procedural animation Dynamic Ai and billions of pages of text all support this vast Ensemble of creatures and characters which means the refined cutscenes motion captured animation performance capture dialogue are simply not possible do expect some robotic motion lip syncing glitches jumps and some rough edges during many moments of play but it really does come with the territory here that said the visual quality materials lighting and effects and dynamic nature of the game do still impress and are certainly a big step up over their prior games even at 1440p the image is sharp thanks to a selection of anti-aliasing options and upscaling choices within the menu and video players get the best with dlss2 and dlaa which can be chosen independently of each other AMD and Intel players lose out here though but can at least Choose smaa Or TAA as your AAA of choice alongside fsr1 spatial upscaling which is no comparison to dlss2 as you would assume and it's a shame really and a surprise that fsr2 is not included as an Nvidia sponsored title it may be related maybe not but I do hope it is added in later to expand those reconstruction options for older and non-nvidia players alike but fsr1 does require anti-aliasing to be added on top which is a worthy note as you can turn it off by accident in the menu when changing between these and it'll leave the game looking very unstable even at 4K you have been warned I'm gonna buy the edge of your kids and your birdies and your dogs in regards to the engine itself it uses PBR materials and lighting with subsurface scattering on skin and even mushrooms diffuse and speculative surfaces all react well under a variety of light sources and the game is very vibrant with good assets textures and overall a strong art design throughout the menu itself is not swamped with options but the visual guides on many selections are welcome with a written summary for all including those with or without pictures these do help many though to make the right choice a picture is worth a thousand words and all that but much of the detail in the game comes from the normal maps and the high resolution textures for faces clothes buildings rocks and more this does add a lived in and vibrant world to Rome and battle within and character design and models are very good with particularly good hair quality with a variety of geometry cards as a key aspect of any RPG worth its salt you want to ensure you can tailor your avatar to have more bites than Bach and it is in the cinematics and the character selection screen that you can really appreciate the quality across all of them from the head right down to the um well moving on the textures are stronger across the game and although MIP streaming and loading issues did crop up across all my tested Hardware due to the nature and turn-based combat of the game it was never a real problem outside of the real-time cinematics where it is noticed the most but more so on Lower End Hardware foreign does benefit from my higher resolution due to the fine details in Textures hair and the high frequency use across the game's display in comparison of all options on PC unsurprisingly dlaa comes out on top at the biggest performance penalty at 4K resolutions but stability in detail are pin sharp the next rung down is dlss2 quality mode which although a 1440p base it can look sharper and more stable than the game running at 4K TAA but it offers up a huge performance boost over that mode and dlaa of 42 and 54 respectively in between these comes fsr1 Ultra quality with TAA enabled which although it has slightly worse IQ than dlss quality and a small 8 performance cost over that mode it does improve over native 4K due to the sharpness of the image and 31 better performance due to is 2954 by 1662 base output the sharpening options can be tweaked in the menu but AMD cast sharpening can only be applied when dlss or fsr1 is disabled moving through the settings we do not really see huge impacts to image quality and details in general until medium and low the impact between Ultra and high is mostly textures fog volumes and clouds with other options of Bloom depth of field quality and subsurface scattering being areas to tweak if you need that GPU performance back as you move down the scale High to medium is mostly shadows and clutter in the world with the biggest gaps coming from medium to low with start reductions in Shadow object triangle count ambient occlusion textures and World density as such as long as you keep textures model details Shadows at medium and ambient inclusion on the cost versus visual impact is more than worth it when GPU constrained as my steam deck optimized settings here show these are also perfect for all low to medium gpus with the extra grunt used to bump up resolution on top of that if you have it as you see here with some comparisons between PCS Ultra at 4K and fsr1 1080p on the steam deck optimized settings the trade-off can be hard to notice at times and it certainly pays off in performance although not all hits in that area are GPU related foreign [Music] based on my RTX 2070 then 4K dlss quality at high is good enough most of the time for a close 60 FPS level outside of heavy NPC swamp battles which can impact CPU or 1800p Ultra if you want the finest effects with close to 60 FPS as possible on more powerful Hardware in my Rx 6800 with a Zen 5600x we can go to 4K fsr1 Ultra quality Max settings and keep your lock on that 60fps more often even during CPU heavy moments due to the extra IPC and clock speeds it has even with two less cores Vulcan is better than DirectX 11 on average due to better CPU and GPU utilization in my tests shown here even in CPU bound sections as here with my 2700x we can see between 8 and 10 better performance in vulcan's favor however I recommend DirectX 11 for NVIDIA players specifically as it crashed often on my RTX machine and even AMD players get a better delivery of Vulcan but it still crashed a few times for me to not recommend it and it caused many bugs on the steam deck when forced on the team have noted that Vulcan is still in its beta state so once these driver issues are ironed out it would likely be the recommended API for all PC players now the steam deck represents the low end obviously but loses none of the Brilliance and quality larion have produced here the user might optimized settings you can cap at 30 FPS and most of the time stay above that level to never feel bad however turning on TAA has a small but noticeable impact performance of around six percent which can be enough to cause GPU drops under that 30 FPS Target using smaa or dropping fsr1 down to Performance can close some of that back but in handheld mode on an 800p screen I preferred the sharper but less stable TAA off option at the higher resolution it offers as it does not stand out as much in your hand the game will stutter at times though and just as it does on high-end PC these are CPU and memory related during the bigger NPC battles do expect some 50 to 100 milliseconds that is between turns as the engine processes the next moves of the NPCs but it can also have memory streaming hits across the world as you walk in into new areas this happens even on higher end Hardware but it is reduced the more powerful your CPU and memory is as is always the case with a logic heavy Dynamic game like this CPU demands are high and being DirectX 11 really at the moment this means it can become single thread bound at times due to the main worker render thread holding up the other cores although it does make good utilization of multiple cores but it can occur from time to time one big talking point the game is the complete local co-op split screen mode that accompanies the online four-player Clans on PC this is accessed simply by connecting two controllers you can't use keyboard with this and anytime during the game you can then join in and even create a new member as you do be aware though the cost of this is very high as the game is running the entire game logic and rendering twice as there are no limits on what you can both do during split screen which means dual cutscenes battles and exploration are possible if you are in the same area then cutscenes run full screen but if not they remain split using my 2070 as an example 4K dlss quality maximum loses 51 of its performance showing that the dual screens require two times the performance Cal suprees dropping down to 1080p dlss quality returns just most of that impact but even here do expect the demands at times to push it down to the 30s as such I recommend that unless you have the highest End Hardware you Target 30fps and then increase the resolution as much as possible the technical achievement and sheer amount of data management and memory demands here are worthy of exceptional praise indeed this is not like a split screen racer as the game is running twice for all intents and purposes and even during two hours of dual play on both my Rx 6800 and RTX 2070 it never crashed once so long as you're in dx11 mode and then you buy your guts they'll peel your face off and nail it to a now the team have been very honest on the impact this mode has had on the series s version with it causing a delay on the Xbox release as noted on their site blog using the steam deck which also has this option disabled but you can enable it with a small command which I do not recommend but I have done here for testing and the cost is as large as they stated we can see the performance in this mode is completely memory Bound in bandwidth and footprint during the battle of the game locks at 20 FPS or lower due to the double buffered frame rate it has as triple buffering would help out but it takes even more memory which it doesn't have in this handheld device even in small tests here you can see the vram and system Ram heaps actually exceed the 16 gigabyte total round the machine has which means SSD page swapping is being used which is terrible for performance now outside of this the CPU and GPU demands even at 720p fsr1 are too much to manage anything close to playable rate and it demonstrates the issues the team are having with the series s version recall the console has less Ram than the steam Deck with 10 gigabytes total and only 8 gigabytes available to the game which is split between vram the Lion's Share and the game itself Now using the PC with split screen enabled only at 1080p which is likely higher than the series that's what we're running this mode anyway upon boot up the game uses just under five Gigabytes of system RAM and just over five gigabytes of vram this itself is exceeding the level of the series s in total but the console has an advantage in that it does not require dual pools of data to be shared between system RAM and vram so if we assume that some reductions on that footprint can be made on Series S it will still hover close to that eight gigabyte total however playing the game for short periods of time splitting up this increases that load to just under 13 gigabytes for the game and the GPU Ram which means across both pools it's using around 13 gigabytes and even if they can cut 35 of that total budget on Console it would still exceed the 8GB gigabyte total it has but this is not the only issue they have though bandwidth demands are very high here the 480p steam deck version here with approximately 88 gigabytes of bandwidth is often in the teens and single digits the series s has approximately two and a half times that bandwidth which means all things being equal it would have similar performance levels as you see here at only 1440p by 8 10. this is not an exhaustive test by any means but it does show that the dx11 path to consoles will use and the memory footprint of the S they do need far more optimization to get this to work at playable levels and these steam deck and PC tests reinforce that the team are committed to getting the game working and hopefully Series S and X players who aren't impacted by this issue can get hands on the title later this year or early next and PlayStation 5 players get to play it next month Madness fret the final test before I wrap up all things here is the fact that loading being a dx11 title even with an SSD is heavily CPU related due to the fact it's likely not using multiple cores to decompress the data here we see the PC runs at 33 seconds and one minute nine using the steam deck both on ssds and that's because of the far weaker CPU and bandwidth of the steam deck so just be aware that the game does have some long loading times throughout so Boulder's Gate 3 is in my opinion the Pinnacle of the Dungeons and Dragons genre it's a shame the advanced Dungeons and dragon rules were not included even if it was an option but the complexity to add that would be very large I am fully aware that said the game really delivers on the imagination we had as kids playing on the tabletop cars and Miniatures we brought to life in our own heads yes the game has come out of Early Access but it still has a few bugs and issues and glitches as I mentioned but it really is part and parcel of a game that's heavily Dynamic and data driven as this the fact that the only reconstruction unique is dlss2 with fsr1 being okay but certainly not up with fsr2 means AMD Intel and older Nvidia players lose out so hopefully this is something the team can add later with lots of patches coming even during this review period I'm sure that the single player and split screen will all benefit from these updates fundamentally though if you are on the lookout for a new Dungeons and Dragons game then Boulder's Gate 3 is an absolute work of art visually very impressive and well constructed with such a broad range of dynamic action and storytelling it works exceptionally well the music and voice acting is superb and fundamentally this is a high quality product that has taken time and passion and that is seen in every aspect of the title from the steam deck right up to top NPC you will not be disappointed on the visuals the sound and overall the enjoyment this game offers anyway that's it for another deep dive into game technology performance and all things pixel and power related if you like what we do here on IGN performance reviews keep it IGN and we'll catch you on the next one keep still there delftila is restless [Music] come cougar we took back the idol surely do

Channel: IGN

Views: 165,422

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldurs gate 3 release, baldurs gate 3 classes, baldurs gate 3 larian studios, baldurs gate 3 divinity engine 4.0, baldurs gate 3 steam deck, baldurs gate 3 comparisons, baldurs gate split screen, baldurs gate 3 ign performance review, baldurs gate 3 DnD, dungeons & dragons 5th edition rules, baldurs gate 3 ps5, baldurs gate 3 Vulkan, guardian baldurs gate 3, baldurs gate 3 guardian, baldurs gate 3 pc, baldurs gate steam deck split screen, baldurs gate GoG

Id: HyaeoUdc10A

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023