Baldur's Gate 3 Performance Stress Test - Can Your CPU Hold Up?

not too shortly after my Baldur's Gate 3 main review released I took to the comments on YouTube Reddit and elsewhere and noticed a Trent a lot of veterans who had played the game throughout its Early Access period wanted specific and more testing of the game's third act which apparently had some very intense performance issues that were not there in the first and second acts sure there was a good amount of Hyperbole and vitriol in some of these comments too but the more eloquently phrased ones definitely got me thinking it would not be the first time that a long RPG ran worse the longer the player progressed into it who could forget how bethesda's games like Skyrim performed on PS3 but getting to experience end game content that maybe takes 50 hours or more of play while getting a review out on time is not exactly easy but thanks to the Twitter user Darkness FX who offered me their save and some handy hints I've been able to go back into the game with a 99 hour save and get some hard data about the performance in the game's third Act which I will talk about today in this video so while I just referenced Skyrim on PS3 what appears to be happening in bg3's third Act is very different most likely in Skyrim PS3 it was a memory issue for the third act in this game the issue is more about the density of objects in AI while there's gate 3's third act takes place well in Baldur's Gate a large city in the series lore and as such it has a lot of non-player characters in it and a good deal more than the game's first and second acts the issues caused by this in the third act were actually mirrored in my initial review how I noted a mid-spec PC in those areas Laden with NPCs had lower performance and poor frame times that I hope the developers would clean up via patching if possible the issues that I'm showing on the ryzen 5 3600 here in dx11 and in Vulcan on the coast side town of the First Act are Amplified in the third act by a great degree as there's many more visible on-screen NPCs in that act just running through the city from one point of interest to another shows off how many more NPCs there are than in my first captures from the first act so naturally I actually think it makes a lot of sense for this third act to be heavier than anything seen in the first or second acts there's a dramatic increase in the amount of NPCs which then subsequently makes the game more CPU limited on many PCs out there if not all of them and I also think it starts to then amplify other issues that the game already had technically due to the CPU limitedness but were otherwise not so visible actually in the previous chapters one of the quirks of this heavier CPU performance in act 3 is that it makes movement in the game a lot more jittery check this out here's me just sitting still with the frame rate of around 90 FPS when CPU limited under dx11 on a core I9 12 900k which is of course a monster CPU now watch me start moving the character around in many circles due to the movement the game starts to run 20 percent worse on average while CPU limited even though the view and the amount of objects on screen is essentially the exact same but movement appears to be causing frame times in fps spikes in a bad way that is pretty poor honestly and it's going to scale worse on even lower end CPUs as to why moving the camera and the character ever so slightly here in the third act specifically shows a specific performance drop well that's hard to say if I were to guess I would imagine movement changes something about AI navigation needing to be updated which then incurs a cost but it's hard to know for certain another issue found in the third Act is in camera transitions from cutscenes or conversations in the third act a conversation like this one will have much larger frame time stutters in it and massive drops when the camera changes angles to enter a conversation the size of stutters going into conversations in previous acts is definitely not as large if I were to guess as to why I would imagine the greater CPU burden in these areas in general in the third Act is amplifying issues that the game already had that were CPU limited like transitioning into cutscenes so transitions into cutscenes and these pauses that associated with them are now more visible and longer and worse in the third act but the biggest difference in the third Act is found in frame Health as I like to call it going back to my act 1 recordings let me show you what I mean on a ryzen 5 3600 when running around that town you'll see areas where the frame length increases from frame to frame and you get a higher variance of frame length when the frame time line is jittery and stuttery as we see here I call that bad frame Health when it's more smooth and regular I would say the game has good frame Health the third Act of Baldur's Gate 3 in the city tends to show bad frame Health just as you can see here in this performance recording of the game in dx11 mode when running around the area on a 12 900k the frame health is not too great with a greater variance in frame times compounding on this are the earthquakes you can see in the city which coincide with large spikes in the frame time which look like bigger stutters on screen visually as it is right now though I'm showing you one of the better case scenarios with a 12900k and the dx11 API you can actually get much worse performance for one you could run the game under Vulcan much like I showed in the games act 1 on AMD and Nvidia Hardware Vulcan runs these MPC Laden areas of the game worse on average than dx11 in this test scene we see Vulcan running on average 10 percent worse that is a sizable chunk of performance for running a more modern API and you'll definitely notice that difference in frame rates when the frame rates are already this low on a core i912 900k just hugging above 60 FPS essentially as I said though the 12900k is definitely not the worst case CPU you could have an older less high-end CPU like a ryzen 5 3600 when while CPU limited we can see that it has rather disastrous performance if the 50 cut on frame rate next to the 12900k in the same scenario was not bad enough well then look at its frame time health and that tips it over the edge while the 12900k definitely has some frame time spikes and jitteriness to it the ryzen 5 3600 is much worse off with nearly every other rendered frame on the Verizon 53600 showing a great variance in length and this is visible to the naked eye while playing the game it may run around 30 FPS on average at times but it would never look like a 30 FPS that is smooth as the frame variance is too high g-sync or freesync monitors cannot deal with such frame time variants and would also look jittery there and guess what it can get even worse than this what if you are a sorcerer an act 3 and use a number of summoned creatures as you can see here I'm raising an army of the undead to follow my party around and when I do this while running through the city we can see how it further decreases the performance down by 10 but notice the frame time graph how it is more erratic with all the summons there on the right this isn't hugely problematic on the 12900k but you can see how the frame times in the frame time graph with the AI summons start to show a spikier steep hill and valley-like presentation essentially with all the AI summons around we can see that there's one frame that is much more expensive periodically than all the others on the CPU and this happens in an up down motion what is more expensive every couple frames well maybe it's pathfinding maybe it's an AI update maybe it's an animation update it's hard to know of course but on an older mid-range chip like the ryzen 5 3600 this AI update is Amplified with all the summons going around and it's even more disastrous in that same scene with the AI summons on that AMD chip we can see how all the AI summons will reduce the average frame rate by just only six percent but take a look at the frame time graph it was Rocky before but now it's positively mountainous every 300 milliseconds or so there's a colossal increase in frame time over usually are around fifty percent this leads to jerky movement so the game will never ever look smooth honestly on a Zen 2 chip this third act in general plays rather disastrously just moving around with the summons in a completely empty area in the dungeon for example shows Big Frame time lurches and stutters which don't look good at all and really impact playability so to answer my question at the beginning of this video yes the game's third act runs worse than the first and second acts I think you can explain it though there's just so much more AI on screen now which then appears to amplify other CPU limited issues but is this performance Justified and can you do anything about it regarding the latter question I don't think there's much you can do even at the absolute lowest settings you can see how the average performance is lifted by Just Around 14 percent on a ryzen 5 3600 the frame times are a bit less erratic when doing so but those earthquakes still cause Big Frame time spikes and of course the performance is rather low and you're seeing much worse graphical presentation due to the L LOD hits what about Vulcan on this low end CPU yeah this doesn't do anything just like on the core i912 900k where we can see Vulcan running around seven percent slower on average on a ryzen 5 3600 in the Nvidia driver compared to the dx11 cold path and a similar level of performance degradation there even while running on an AMD GPU just like in my original video here we can also see that frame times with Vulcan are just as unsteady as they are with dx11 so Vulcan isn't really causing an improvement here and in fact it's a detriment what about a 30 FPS cap while the game's own 30fps cap with vsync on does not have proper frame pacing so I would say avoid it if you use vsync but even when using nvidia's half refresh adaptive sync as found in the driver you can see some moments of rising spiky frame times above 33.3 milliseconds due to the game's CPU limited characteristics on the ryzen 5 3600 it is more consistent visually but the larger frame time spikes that occur are visually intrusive so you you can mitigate the CPU issues in this third act with a frame rate cap but that isn't an ideal situation not at all now to come back to my first question about whether or not this performance is Justified in the third act and can it maybe be fixed to answer this I think we can look at how the performance scales with the amount of cores and threads I'm looking at a core I9 12900k we see some interesting data as you can see here the scaling across many cores and threads and MBC Laden areas of the game is far from ideal the best performing combination is actually eight cores without hyper threading on which isn't good using the six core result as a base for performance we can see how eight P cores without HT runs around four percent better than that and the full core I9 12900k with e-cores and hyper threading enabled runs just about two percent better than the six core result even though it's more than doubling the amount of threads and cores available to the game the surprise of course is that the worst performer is the HP cores with hyper threading which runs about six percent slower and yes hyper threading and running worse is a fully repeatable data point and I triple checked that the numbers across six cores and the full 12 900k shows us that after six cores the game does not scale well in performance and it's not utilizing extra threads to meaningfully improve the frame rate and frame time experience in fact with hyper threading on the game is running worse on this CPU as a reminder good scaling will look like this as we see in cyberpunk 2077. yes this is a much larger game Studio of course with a lot more money invested into the game but this is the type of scaling we should prefer to see on many threaded machines as I see it the scaling shows me that this game needs more work in the act 3 environment as an addendum to my initial review I would say the game needs to improve the performance on many thread and chord machines by utilizing many more cores and threads to improve the fluidity of the player experience in these CPU limited scenarios another Improvement I would say is to improve the situation around stutters that become more visible in act 3 the things like earthquakes and Camera positional changes or just moving the camera at times to not be causing such visible increases in frame time especially on large CPUs and like I said in my original review as well Vulcan is still such a question mark here in Baldur's Gate 3. its purpose seems void if it does not meaningfully help CPU performance when you need it the most and I imagine a good and performant implementation could be the basis for helping out CPU limited issues in act 3 that I just detailed in the course of this video and with that being said I've reached the end of this video I hope you enjoyed this exploration of the act 3 Performance in Baldur's Gate 3 and how it could possibly improve if you did hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you are already subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts video support DF on patreon to get years of our content in high quality for download comment below follow on Twitter and as always

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 228,875

Keywords:

Id: e5xe0cy_cAE

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023