Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General SSD Required?

So i Have an Easy Store WD with 1.55 TB Free space on it will this be Compatible to Play BG3???

Minimum system requirements do say SSD required. You can attempt to run it on non-SSD but the game might run very poorly or not at all.

Hmmm I Thought a WD and SSD Are the same........

I've installed it on both, and the HDD is definitely slower to load everything. Even the main menu slowly puts the background together detail by detail on the HDD.

when you enter the game area it takes the textures from your drive and places them in ram... you need a min of 10G free ram just to load the background textures etc so if your system has less then its using the drive as Ram

if your system has 12G -16G free Ram then it should be running fully [assuming you don't also have something else running] and the delay times are only when you load a save game from a different area or when moving from one large area to another

an old dice type drive will in deed play this game - with small delays at area transisions
an ssd drive will load new areas faster than the old disc drives
systems with small amounts Ram will load the slowest reguardless of drive type and low Ram systems [including things like PS5] will tend to crash more offen per hour of game play

so to answer your question, yes that drive will play BG3... there is a lot of stink going around the internet right now about fuckpunk needing SSD after its new patch but thats a different kind of game and really should have needed SSD anyway if was kicked out the door in a half playabe state

I'm pretty sure WD is just a brand...Western Digital. They make both SSDs and HDDs.

I Believe The Brand is Easy Store i Purchased it at Best Buy for like $60, Its and external Drive (WD) With 1.81 TB of Space.

Easystore isn't a brand...it's just catchy gimmicky marketing buzz word. WD is the brand, Western Digital. And there are Easystore WD hard drives of both SSD and HDD types. You can google it. Easystore WD doesn't say anything about what type of storage it is.

Hit ctrl - alt - dlt / Choose Task Manager / Then choose Performance tab at the top. Under Disk on the left it will say either HDD or SSD. If it says HDD then you may need to upgrade. If it says SSD you are good.

It seems that software producers, including game companies, just keep making their software more and more cumbersome and bulky just because newer hardware can run it. Understandably, if what you were trying to acheive was only possible on the new hardware there would be a point, but I don't think that is the case. Often it is laziness with regard to exploitation of resources or it is simply bad design.

I remember in the early days of computing how skilled engineers were trying to optimize the code so they could make room for just one missing byte in memory space, or using clever tricks in order to speed optimizing the code. Today programmers laugh their ass to pieces if you suggest saving memory space, or arrange things in a way so that you minimize the need for saving/loading to/from a hard drive. 'With more power comes more responsibility' - not in the software world lol. Graphics wise it is true, hardware is pushed to the limits trying to obtain a better experience for the users, but the need for a SSD drive should not be necessary for a game like BG3.

I don't pretend to know how Larian did the coding of BG3, but I know what a modern computer can do, and what is possible through smart software. Starting up the hard drive should only be necessary if a) the physical memory is not a big enough memory space to contain data that needs to be readily available or b) you need to run video or load new content (new area for instance). In case of a) the game code should be smart about not needing to access hard drive data too much in the middle of time critical processes. In the case of b) well, it is perfectly possible to run HQ video fluently from a hard drive so I don't understand why games stall in cut scenes. It's not a hardware problem definitely. And new content can be loaded at times when it is ok for the user to sit and wait a little while loading is going on. All in all, I don't believe for a second that any user experience would need to be diminished if the game was made for HDD hardware.

From a user perspective though: Buy a SSD. It is a good investment in any case, and you cannot control how software developers design their code. Your windows system in general will also perform better. Happy gaming!

I'll just focus on this bit right here...SSDs have been around for quite a while now but they used to be expensive and largely optional, but we're past that now. SSDs have become affordable and mandatory. The time of HDDs is finished now, just like floppy discs, dvds, VHS, etc. I had to buy a new laptop last year and I was surprised to find that none of the electronics stores in my area sold ANY laptops with HDDs in them anymore...they were ALL SSDs...everything from the cheap $200 laptop to the expensive ones that cost thousands only had SSDs of some sort in them. If you've not moved on from HDD by now you should, because their time is well and truly over and the vast majority of games going forward, especially AAAs, will mandate SSDs.

As for optimizing games for space economy, every studio has only so much time and so many resources...they could choose to spend that time making a far better game with far more content, reactivity, etc. or they could focus on making a far worse game but oh boy it's very tightly packed, with the best space economy in the universe.

You misunderstand if you think I am advocating for not using SSD in new computers. I definitely agree it is a step forward. But just because you have extra resources does not mean you should not be thinking performance and resource management when designing software. Some people are still using older computers, and forcing people to upgrade their equipment every 5 years is a waste of resources and not fair to the users. Today it is the SSD, tomorrow it will be something else, and it is not how things should work imo. It was a necessary evil in the early days of the PCs but not today.

About resource management, I am not talking about the 150GB of data the game takes up on the hard drive, I have no doubt it is necessary for the amount of content provided in the game, I only talk about the need to access the hard drive continously and extensively. It is a way to utilize the hard drive that is contrary to how the hard drive is intended to be used. Hard drive is for long term storage of data that stays when the computer is turned off, computer memory is for temporary data that has to be readily available. What todays systems do when running out of memory is they use some of the hard drive for RAM, imo a bad strategy that leads to slow systems.

And I don't agree that better resource management would take away much time and money from actual game design. It is a matter of being smart about it, and to actually care about people with older computers.

No it is not. That is how HDDs were intended to be used. SSDs were designed and created for the very specific purpose of fast access to vast amounts of the data stored on them at once. Did you manage to completely miss the part where I talked about what's happening with SSDs and HDDs right now? Because this comment comes across as you not getting it quite yet...HDDs are done. SSDs were never made or intended to function the same as HDDs...they were made and intended to function very differently and a lot better.

Agree with Solarians concerns about how games force people to buy equipment they otherwise wouldn't need and I agree with Darth_trethon 's characterization of SSDs. SSDs are really large memory sticks.

@thrudder - it might help if you stop using SSD abbreviation and start searching for a Solid State Drive. You can pick up a cheap one for 10 dollars or so and when you run out of space you can buy another cheap one and put them into a RAID. I'm seeing some nice ones in the 512G range for about 20 dollars.

I have 4 small, cheap SSDs in a RAID and I regularly back those up on my HDD (RAIDS are prone to failure).

Very short: No, I did not miss your point, and I read and understood what you wrote, I just disagree. There may come a time when drive space and RAM become one but I don't think we are there yet. If you force me to I will explain why, but it might not really be suited to this thread or forum? And I respect your views on the matter, just disagree.

We're not getting rid of RAM quite yet but we ARE at the point where SSDs work alongside and largely compliment RAM in a lot of ways and the games industry specifically has gone all is on SSDs three years ago alongside the launch of the new generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

For perspective: The average 7200 RPM HDD has a read/write speed of 80-160MB/s vs the standard SSD that comes pre-installed in every PS5(which is now a nearly three year old console mind you): 7,100 MB/s read speed and 6,800MB/s write speed.

Even the best SSDs on the market (which you cannot assume that PC users have) does not perform nearly as well as DDR4 RAM in terms of speed. Add to that the fact that there is a maximum number of read/writes for flash memory in its lifetime, making it not suitable for RAM. There are RAM technologies that have been in development for some time that combine the speed and durability of RAM with permanent storage properties (the data stays when the computer is turned off), but don't know when that type of RAM will become available for computers in general, or if some other memory technologies will be invented that will change the game, but flash memory is not the answer to general purpose RAM imo.

True but even the fastest of RAMs at this point cannot compensate for the lack of an SSD anymore...the difference is just too enormous. For the super fast RAM to achieve its potential it needs to access the data on the hard drive very fast and if the hard drive has a slow read speed as HDDs do then it would be like having a Ferrari supercar but only being able to drive it around parking lots with a speed limit of of 15mph. Nice Ferrari and all but a bicycle will get you where you're going just as fast.

then its not sutable for running software of any kind... they are only for storage and the speed of the drive becomes irrelevant because its the USB port that runs these type of hardware and they drop in and out all the tiime

Preach it brother! Honestly most people predict HDD's will be gone for anything but long term storage by 2026.