Optimize Baldur's Gate 3 for Your Steam Deck!

hey guys Turk here I hope you're having a good one last weekend I got to recharge my gamer batteries at quakecon one of the largest land parties in the world with nearly 48 Hours of good old-fashioned gaming you guys know I just had to play some Baldur's Gate 3. it has a fantastic story and immersive mechanics and my goodness it looks so good but now that I'm back in reality can that experience translate back to my living room couch and my trusty steam deck today I want to talk to you about the game's limitations how the game could improve a bit visually and give you guys my best steam deck settings grab your D20 let's pass some perception checks uh I rolled pretty low so let's start with the quick and dirty options Baldur's Gate 3 comes with four different quality presets right out of the gate with plenty of opportunities to tweak as we'll talk about later in the video however keep in mind by default FSR is turned on in the balanced mode but we'll cover FSR in just a sec for now let's disable that and look at Raw Dog performance numbers when running from the guard checkpoint outside of the goblin Camp back to the Druid Grotto performance is tolerable the low preset hits a respectable 39 FPS on average while medium barely squeaks by with 31 FPS on average unfortunately for the steam deck Baldur's Gates tie and Ultra presets are just too taxing for valves handheld Landing just above 24 FPS and 1 lows right at 14. this makes it sound like there's only a little bit of wiggle room with this game but how does FSR improve things at low cost quality settings moving from native resolutions to the ultra quality FSR setting instantly buys us an additional five frames or 13 percent going from native to Quality mode is a 7 FPS Improvement going down to balanced almost gets us 9 FPS I won't even bother going down to Performance mode because the quality looks like trash at this point with medium quality settings things are looking even better turning on Ultra quality gets us six extra frames quality mode unlocks nine and balance mode gets us a whopping 11 FPS as I said almost one full year ago FSR is a great asset on the steam deck unfortunately larion Studios only gives us access to fsr1 for now which is far inferior to the latest fsr2 so retweet me asking the devs when they're going to be updating the game with fsr2 so if you want to get back to your romantic speed runs with decent quality settings go with the medium quality settings and FSR and at least quality mode for about 70 percent of a good time but pick up that D20 again we've got a wisdom saving throw Volo has given me some bartic inspiration earlier so I of course rolled a Natty 20. have y'all noticed anything off we're right outside of the Druid Grove at the beginning of the game do you guys see anything weird I sure did take a look at our utilization charts even though our frame rate is hovering around 30 FPS here we are seeing some wild changes in the behavior from the game when we look towards the bridge in the blighted village we're extremely GPU bound with the GPU bumping up to nearly its maximum clock speed of 1.6 gigahertz but as we turn towards The Grotto the tables turn and we are now CPU limited also near the deck's maximum clock speed of 3.5 gigahertz this means that even if we get magical quality settings there's no real real good way to guarantee performance since we'll be CPU gated most of the time if we dig it a little bit deeper we clearly see that single threaded performance is our main weak spot on the steam deck which is the main culprit for any of the frame studders we encounter throughout the game so with no consistent way to improve frames 30fps will be our Target for our gaming session and unfortunately we have to use the steam decks full 15 watt mode to keep consistency as high as possible I tried to save some battery life adjusting the GPU clock speed to about a thousand megahertz but it would constantly dip in those GPU limited spots I also tried setting the battery to its magic 2 hour mark But setting the Apu to 11 Watts it just starves the system in CPU limited scenarios given our 30fps Target and 15 watt mode we'd be done here right roll a D20 you failed your deception check since we're already at our lower frame rate threshold and now we're CPU limited most of the time this gives us room to bump up our quality settings this game has a lot of settings some that drastically impact performance and some that make the game noticeably cleaner and some that just don't affect us in our normal gameplay the first one you gotta check isn't even in the game but it's in the quick access menu turn off allow tearing in bg3 it makes the frame time consistency terrible which alone will help smooth out our gameplay it won't fix everything but it's a good start next is the texture setting at low our system only uses about 7.7 gigabytes of RAM so Crank that sucker up to at least high with practically no impact on performance and only a modest increase in Ram allocation improve textures alone will enhance your digital tabletop experience the rocks on the left don't look like Globs of gray and the improved foliage is a pleasant upgrade Baldur's Gate 3 was designed for a higher definition experience so these anti-aliasing settings significantly impact the visuals by default the image looks pretty good we get clear definition in the edges and some slight jaggies in some of those finer edges but overall it's pretty serviceable smaa though it looks over sharp the rocks in the distance look a lot better still the finer details in the chain mail of my main character some of those character models and the moving foliage just looks unnatural but going to the Other Extreme though is TAA this looks way too soft the image does look significantly cleaner but the definition and separation of the foliage character details and the overall presentation just looks too soft and combine that with FSR yuck adding salt to the wound TAA costs us six percent in terms of frame rate so I recommend either leaving anti-aliasing off or stick to smaa this setting will change drastically with future game improvements so get comfortable with this setting Shadow quality appears to modify the resolution of the Shadows coming across the scene at the Windmill at The blighted Village at low we get plenty of jagged edges from the Shadows moving up to medium improves it a little bit but it does cost us an additional frame of performance High goes the extra step cleaning up the darker areas but that does impact performance too much for my taste so for me medium settings is a good balance on our 7-inch screen if y'all saw my Diablo 4 optimized settings video you all know I love me some ambient occlusion with the setting disabled exiting from The Grotto is very flat and it just fails to really capture the essence of walking between two massive Boulders exiting a secretive encampment but turn that setting on and the Rocks instantly show their presence sure it does cost us a few frames but with the amount of terrain and Rocky features in the game it is well worth the cost judging by the tooltip in the menus model quality aims to improve the geometry of terrain and the objects in the scene and sure enough the medium setting looks surprisingly good moving it to high does cost us two frames in performance so keep that setting at medium instant distance also behaves just like the tool tip at low across the bridge looks really Barren but bumping the settings up to medium we start to get some of the flowers and the grass from across the way and if we we go to a different Road in the high detail settings we get even more quality coming closer to our character surprisingly High doesn't impact our performance much here either so go with either the high or medium settings here detail distance Works similarly but it looks to impact the amount of foliage actually rendered into the frame at medium there are a few extra grass Sprouts by The Rock on the left and at high more pops up across the bridge again performance isn't impacted much so high is my preferred setting now you'll notice these past few settings we've been right up next to our characters in my playthrough of bg3 I am rarely this close to my character so settings like texture filtering clouds and many of the post-processing effects don't typically manifest in a meaningful way texture filtering has a minimal impact on performance so I stick that to 8X as for clouds I lost half of a frame going to the high setting so feel free to go as low as you want to save some frames I do feel like though that the high setting May pay off in certain atmospheric conditions and the remaining post-processing effects don't impact performance I turned on subsurface scattering for more Vivid darker environments as for depth of field it looks to only work during cut scenes but it adds that extra layer of cinematography that might help you Swoon over Carlock fog quality is the bane of the steam deck's existence and in Baldur's Gate 3 it's a lot wider than say diablo 4. at low the fog is very apparent and it's quite distracting sometimes turning it down to medium does blend the fog a little bit better but it does cost us a frame or two high improves the blending significantly but that also cuts into our frame rate by another frame or two at Ultra we have dropped a total of three FPS or about 10 percent in just a static scene which isn't great if I'm looking for a balance of performance and visuals medium is the optimal setting now we're getting towards the bottom of the settings Barrel animation quality settings change the frame rate of the NPCs across the scene at low the Goblins look rather rigid and could use a bit of smoothing and at medium chasing chickens never looked so fun high adds even more FPS into the mocap but with our 30fps cap on our steam deck we'll likely not see the difference in a last-ditch effort to squeeze performance from the steam deck I went ahead and toggled off both the dynamic crowds and the slow hard drive mode I thought that dialing back on CPU utilization might have helped us out with the dynamic crowds but that didn't exactly pan out slow hard drive mode claims to load more assets into memory to reduce streaming while gaming now we do have some extra Ram so why not well it doesn't work as well as we'd hope so maybe cryo utils would be a decent option with that mix let me know in the comments if cryo utils helped you out in this game moving from a depressing 30 FPS low experience to a medium high mix experience is a dramatic Improvement and Visually is a night and day difference with the CPU bottleneck being ever present we must temper our gaming expectations with Baldur's Gate 3 and enjoy the Finer Things in life luckily it's a turn-based RPG so frame rate isn't critical for the experience but I do wish it was a bit smoother looking forward I really hope lyrion Studios can improve their game with CPU optimizations and the inclusion of fsr2 in the coming weeks when those two improvements come I'll make sure to make a pinned comment with any updated settings with many more hours of game testing suppose you want to run these settings on the Rog Ally or any other modern gaming handheld in that case the experience will be very similar the only caveat here will be with the higher resolution screens you're going to have to run FSR in balanced or even performance mode to get similar frame rates as to what I'm showing here but keep in mind that those FSR settings will become more viable with the higher output resolution especially on a smaller screen but that's all I got to say about my optimized settings for Baldur's Gate 3 on the steam deck I'll go ahead and scroll through the settings one last time so that you guys can take a screenshot and share this with your friends so that all you steam Deckers can have the best gaming situation possible as you roll the dice slice of monsters and of course have a great time gaming on one of the best RPGs of 2023. of course you guys can catch me over on Twitter at the Turk and make sure you guys come back to the community tab I'm going to be putting some polls up wondering what you guys want to see from upcoming videos I've got a lot of graphics cards to look at as well as star field coming around the corner so I definitely am looking for your input but thank you guys for sticking to the end of the video I hope you've enjoyed it I'll catch you guys in the next one later

Channel: TheTerk

Views: 19,801

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, steam deck, baldurs gate 3 optimization, baldurs gate 3 fps, baldurs gate 3 settings, baldurs gate 3 fps guide, baldurs gate 3 tips and tricks

Id: Q6PhkropNnU

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2023