Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Vulkan vs DX11

I was at Waukeen's Rest (sp?) and notice serous lag on my machine playing at 2K with a Nvidia 3080. I had been playing with the default DirectX 11 driver. So I figured why not try out Vulkan. And ... wow. What a difference. Game is now smooth and fluid and I think the graphics look better as well.

Curious what other users experience has been. Is Vulkan consistently better than DX11, or is it just better on specific hardware? Not sure why that wasn't the default driver to begin with.

I'd love to run the game on Vulkan, but it keeps crashing too often. RX5700 XT here with updated drivers. So, I'm kinda forced to play on DX11.

I AM ON 5700 AND ME TOO. It's infuriating that I have to use dx11 as I loose close to 40% of my fps.

DX11 seems to be the most stable, the better performing and the one with the renderer offering the better imagine quality/least amount of technical issues (i.e. flickering or slow-loading textures) for me.

I'd like to be in team Vulkan from an ideological standpoint, but it clashes blatantly with the reality I can directly experience playing the game.


P.S. On a AMD 5800 CPU and a Nvidia 3080ti.

Both run smooth for me initially, but DX11 starts to let in some stuttering after playing for too long.

Vulkan stays smooth. Unfortunately, Vulkan sometimes outright crashes. It's only happened a couple of times, but it's never happened to me with DX11, so I tend to go with that just to avoid the potential of crashing.

Hmm, hasn't crashed for me... yet. But good to know. Thanks for the feedback!

I have several nvidia cards (one is also 3080) and several cpus and I have exact same behavior as you. DX11 Suffocates CPU single thread on NPC heavy areas like waukeens rest.

Vulkan is spikes occasionally like DX11, but generally CPU single thread usage is so so much lower.

Only explanation I have come up is the NPC activity like walking around the screen. On those occasion my 5950x ryzen runs out of ST power on single threads can spike even to 100% with DX11 causing issues.

So I play with Vulkan. That is not problem free either. I have to restart game after 1-3 hours. I notice it from the fact that camera panning becomes jumpy. I attribute this behavior to saving (and reloading) and some kind of memory leak.

Vulkan is WAY better for me in every way.

I get 1-3 crashes per hour with DX11, sometimes more, and the framerate progressively drops more and more as time goes on. Using Vulkan, I get maybe 1 crash every 3-4 hours since the latest update and the frame rate stays consistent the entire time. This is with a 4080.

I'm using a 2060 and Vulkan is by far the more stable. Dx11 got to the point where it wouldn't even launch. I have yet to crash using Vulkan, and have had ONE graphical freeze in almost 50 hrs of gameplay. Thank Pete for multiple launchers!