Baldur's Gate 3 PS5 vs PC Performance Review

open the booty gate in the past month we've had two of the biggest games of the year launch and to ensure they do not lose the hype Marion studios are back with a second release of the first the PlayStation 5 Port of Boulders Gate 3 is here dual modes of plays Split Screen Co-op and Myriad of possibilities will act 3 bring all to their knees how good is that 60fps mode and what does it cost how high and low can those numbers go we answer all that and more in our performance review [Music] now if you're looking for details on the game the engine Split Screen Graphics and our bigger look at multiple PC apis and steam deck let me cover that last month in our PC review today we focus on the PS5 Port comparisons to PC so let's start with the modes it offers out of the gate we have a simple toggle in the video menu to enable or disable performance mode the text gives us some numbers with non-performance mode quality here for ease runs on a native 1440p which matches the UI and output of the game has no upscaling or reconstruction is present to push this up further images sharp as noted in the previous PC review and has an obvious PC look to it as I call it anyway with low post processing to the image allowing fine details textures and colors to stand proud and not be softened by any image effects such as motion blur or heavy TAA although the engines TAA does clean up Shimmer not aggressively so and only softens the image slightly on subpixel areas in fine normal Maps hair trees Etc all in all the image compared to a native 4K dlaa pass PC output is very close indeed and does not benefit significantly with a 4K image although it is obviously better for the comments down below so swords at the ready provoke the blade for it 60fps comes at a cost and one of those is relatively big dip in resolution with what looks to be amd's fsr2 reconstruction that reconstructs the image back to 2560 by 1440 from a base resolution of 1707 by 960. possibly aided by the ps5's SDK likely having this as an option as currently on PC only dlss is supported as a reconstruction technique with fsr1 being a spatial upscale method that non-nvidia gpus must fall back on and it's just not in the same league backing this up as the team have stated fsr2 is coming to PC this month or thereabouts in a patch so the team could confirm if this is fsr2 later now compared to PC running 1440p dlaa and then fsr1 Ultra quality with TAA the difference is minor but the image is slightly softer on the PS5 due to that temporal pass but this also makes it more stable the image can be slightly sharper and some areas due to the sharpening pass versus the native 1440p output with no fsr2 pass present however this can cause more fizzle on alpha particles and certainly the hair fins of characters heads and beards which you can see here in these comparisons compounding the IQ issues though is the ghosting and sparse samples this lower temporal pass adds with fallen leaves and high contrast causing obvious blur and noise which is not present with the quality mode again looking similar to a base fsr2 implementation but as TAA is TAA by Nature this is not the Smoking Gun that fsr2 is the culprit I must stress in lower contrast areas this is not as obvious of a sacrifice style and within a few minutes the Boost to temporal resolution versus increased frame rates hides the loss in spatial resolution mostly aside this dip in resolution though a hefty 45 reduction in raw pixels no other FX changes a side depth of field which drops to the cheaper gaussian pass or at least the non noise and non-circular option in the PC menu all others appear to remain the same with the same match to ultra across all aside clouds which Run High in both modes and any resolution related effects such as shadows as tested last time the gap between Ultra and high is relatively small so if the team did need that 10 ish Gap back they could use it but it does point to the fact that this GPU Headroom left on the table here and this PC Port currently at least doesn't utilize the PlayStation Hardware to its fullest get back a moment Gianna with the visuals and modes confirmed we get into how well they run and if the much discussed split screen Court mode is up for the journey now starting with the high visual mode in quality first then 30 FPS is the ceiling and from a wide run of tests across the opening few hours of this game it's pretty close to a locked 30 FPS rate exploring combat cutscenes conversations they all remain stable and evenly paced with no issues and even test testing the final act 3 city of Boulder's Gate itself that remains mostly true mostly but with these sections being notorious for CPU and data impact on even the best PCS on the market some dips under 30 FPS can and will crop up here mixed with stutters and Jitters from streaming memory instantiation and releases along with just general context code and branching model language these are your meat and potato bugs and this act is even noted by the team themselves as a key area for optimization across PC and consoles alike that said the 30 FPS readout is solid enough but exploring the city with so many NPCs dense geometry streaming this heavily impacts the CPU specifically whenever you move the camera and this is likely being done by the ps5's CPU also with the data streaming and decompression and we can see this in the loading tests as with the PlayStation 5 almost 100 slower in loading from a save than my RTX 3080 image Italy with a 5800x 3D which should not be the case as multiple other titles have already shown reinforcing this is my aging Zen 2700 CPU is almost 30 faster at loading than the PS5 in between cutscenes and that's with a slower SATA SSD showing that the CPU is doing all the legwork here and it's not the best use of the PlayStation 5 hardware and that's not a huge issue and should always be expected with ports from PC to console and console to PC in key areas like this the test is really to demonstrate that the PlayStation's 5 CPU in this game is performing more work than it was designed for and this impacts the console heavily in these City areas and this demonstrates it clearly and hopefully is an area this team can improve with later patches across all platforms [Applause] [Music] thank you now taking the opening few hours and the performance mode is again very solid close to a lock 60 FPS is maintained with some stutters and Judas cropping up from time to time as just mentioned with no DRS present in the engine the team have made the easiest and safest Choice here to provide a good amount of GPU Headroom in all cases and this means that the GPU is rarely the cause for dips some may be bandwidth or such related during real-time cinematics but these are never prolonged and could also just be General errors for optimizations as just mentioned but what does affect this mode though is the game now uses an Adaptive vsync which causes tearing across the full height but it mostly and consistently appears at the bottom third of the screen showing that it's unevenly pacing all of these frames and even though the game supports vrr it doesn't work currently and it still tears in this mode on my vrr capture and my LG vrr screen similar to Jedi Survivor earlier this year and the team need to get vrr working in practice and not just lip service as this would at least offer the main reason for vrr to exist as such if you have a vrr screen you're left with the same tearing and dropped frames just like a non-vr1 thankfully though during the opening hours this is almost a non-issue with dense areas of effects Alpha combat and cutscene seeing some but not a large amount of dips and with my 10 minute varied testing bringing in an average rate of 59.01 and a brief flow of 44 FPS with 95 of the frame times remaining at that Target of 16.67 milliseconds which leaves a tangible boost over that 30 FPS mode and it's welcome specifically because that doesn't have any motion blur so it feels a little choppier going between the two but this is not the same result in those previously mentioned final act with it now tearing almost 100 of the time and this is certainly 100 CPU and data related now we have this same performance mode coming in with a profile of an average of 30.7 in this stressful City and it is here and only here for my testing that I recommend you switch to the Quality mode as this delivers through Superior image quality at 1440p more consistent frame rate because it's closer to its Target of 33 milliseconds even though it can still drop into the mid-20s in heavier sections but more importantly it's tearing free and more consistent but the average frame rate being 29.1 it's a no-brainer [Music] oh [Music] what about that split screen then well as discussed in the last video it's impactful even on PC and here the choice of running this on PS5 in the same quality mode makes perfect sense once you flick it on that's what you get 1440 30 FPS and even at that rate with two characters exploring two separate sections of the city we can see performance tank into the high teens at times and even often and frame times are erratic at best here the increase in resolution is welcome and correct as the PC test in a moment will reinforce the GPU is not being taxed here and it is the CPU that's being hammered when the players join up and viewports are sharing similar textures geometry and drawers effectively we do see a closer 30 FPS level reduced view range and outside of this city though the split screen does a decent job of staying at or around that 30 FPS Target which the PC test next shows how demanding it can be so if you want to play in split screen on the couch it works perfectly right now she's a thief hell spawn and you will wait for Kroger's judgment now get back using my best machine of an RTX 3080 pad with the monster gaming CPU in the Zen 5800 X 3D 8 core 16 thread this is significantly faster than what's inside the PS5 running the game at 1440p dlss quality to make sure there's no GPU impact here we get the same 1707 by 960 base resolution as the performance mode on PS5 but we now Target 120 FPS in the city you can see that GPU is sufficiently under taxed here and the CPU and data throughput is being hammered as such even in just single screen we can see dips into the 30s briefly on this machine once you move the demands go up likely from a combination of engine aspects resulting in sub 60 FPS often in this mode and the GPU has nothing to do with the rate we're seeing as outside of this section even with their native 1440p using dlaa we hit 120 FPS most often just not in the city now we throw in the split screen across Boulder's Gate town and we can see frame times and rates often hits the 30 FPS range and even below with a low of 27 FPS which is only 8 FPS higher than the PS5 over the Run of played here the PC averages a more stable 40 FPS rate and shows you that even far superior Hardware in this act will not get you a lock 60 or even 30 and reinforces the team's decision optimization is required here and will benefit all players on war Hardware hope once the Xbox versions dropped we can look forward to a patch that improves that as these tests reinforce how demanding split screen is as both players can be in completely separate areas of the entire game and as the series s has a limited amount of memory and power it explains as we covered last time and backed up again here why the best choice was to drop that mode for the S as is the case for the steam deck out of the box anyway it must be stated that outside of these demanding sections and a few others the game does run while in split screen mode and even on PC you can hit 60fps and above at many points closing out the CPU impacts here using the single player run across Boulder's Gate in its performance mode using an RX 6800 paired with a 5600 x 6 core 12 thread 4.6 gigahertz CPU we can still dip below 30 FPS often and even compared to the performance mode on PS5 we have an average 30 Improvement on this CPU with an average rate of 40.1 FPS versus 30.7 on the PS5 and a similar level of frame time highs and lows the 5800 X 3D by comparison is a further 53 faster than my 5600x here on average which closes out how demanding this section is on the very best CPUs on the market [Music] thank you Baldur's Gate 3 continues to be a passion-filled game this year's scale with an interwoven storytelling is something of Legend at this point you can play the opening segment five times or more and still find new things and paths you never took and the soundtrack is phenomenal giving me Vibes of Basil podorus I love the soundtrack to This Game the data driven and dynamic nature of the game along with the choice of ways and how to play are hard to praise enough and the port here may not use the PS5 Harbor to its fullest specifically that loading and streaming Elements which is likely not using the offloaded i o elements resulting in loading being closer to a lower PC spec and even performance pointing to old-fashioned CPU usage here but the port is anything but Bare Bones control system has been mapped to controller and works perfectly on the couch and even though it doesn't have mouse and keyboard support hopefully that will come sooner and in fact the Dual modes means you can choose FPS or pixels as needed and performance and the impact your IQ is very good outside of those late game segments even split screen which is a technical feat in and of itself on console and works perfectly here in the living room console experience but do expect some rough edges performance issues and slow loading as covered in our previous video and more but from a technical perspective the game is doing a great deal and some patches and updates are of course needed fsr2 act 3 loading here being my main three along with getting vrr working but this port loses none of the Brilliance of the PC version and I'm sure any PS5 DND or even RPG fan will lose weeks of their lives in this one now I must get back to completing act three and that's it for a deep dive into console PC pixels and all things performance related if you like what we do here on IGN performance reviews keep it IGN and we'll catch you on the next one no foreign

Channel: IGN

Views: 116,642

Keywords: Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate III, Cross-Platform Saves, Dungeons and Dragons [D&D], Larian Studios, Local Two-Player Multiplayer, Macintosh, Offline Co-Op Multiplayer, Online Co-Op Multiplayer, Online Four-Player Multiplayer, PC, PlayStation 5, RPG, Split-Screen Multiplayer, Stadia, Xbox Series X|S

Id: gQA54lYPuLE

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2023