Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Performance Issues

I'm hoping to get some sort of megathread together where people can document issues that they're having specifically with performance.
I'm a bit concerned that although I'm right at about dead-center between the minimum and recommended specs that I'm getting performance for what would be considered "low" or "lowest" in other games with similar graphical demands.

I'm thinking maybe it could be set up something like this:

Specs: At or Around Minimum, Average, At or Around Recommended
Issues: Stuttering, Draw-In, Rubberbanding, General Framerate

I haven't heard much conversation about how much (if any) difficulty people are having with running the game, so I'm not sure if my issues are due to my hardware (which is just a few years old and would shock me if that's the issue) or if the problems are just part of the early access experience while optimization is being worked out.

You guys are great! Keep up the good work!

Using MSI afterburner I see that Vulkan uses my gpu to the max -- 98 percent, DirectX uses it at about 64 percent with no performance loss. Temps climb rapidly on Vulkan -- I'm guessing that if anyone is seeing problems with Vulkan it is due to thermal throttling.

I'm having this issue where Vulkan is a slightly smoother experience, but there are these occasional "mini-freezes" that occur about once a minute where everything stops for 2-3 seconds.
DX11 doesn't have those lengthy hiccups, but there's more of a stutter and consistent drops in framerate.

At this point I'm not sure which is worse, honestly.

There are performance issues for sure. Heavy drops in framerate sometimes. The game is far less polished than DOS2 was in EA. But it's a much bigger project so it had to be expected.

100% what im experiencing.

Vulkan :Is generally higher fps but I get these single random stutters (50ms spike) when I'm moving the camera around (especially when out in the world) Camera isa bit juttery too like you can see the camera is not doing a smooth pan when moving it around.

Dx11:Lower fps but it pretty much removes the random stutters when moving the camera around but you also have frametime issues when moving the camera around which makes the camera movement feel juttery/micro hitchy.In the dungeons/closed places I'v been the jutter/hitchyness is pretty much gone but it gets much worst when out in the world probably because there's much more stuff to load like trees,mountains.npc and etc...

This on a 1080ti/9900k/16gb 3200mhz/970 evo SSD.

Specs: GTX1060 with 6GB graphic memory, 16GB RAM, I7-8750 cpu

Issues: Only one issue, and that's is terrible fps, average 20 fps at best, sometime dip below 10 fps. Even I change all my setting to very low.
I don't have any crashes, only terrible fps.

Specs: Radeon Software Version - 19.9.2
Radeon Software Edition - Adrenalin 2019
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 200 Series
Memory Size - 2048 MB
Memory Type - GDDR5
Core Clock - 945 MHz
Windows Version - Windows 10 (64 bit)
System Memory - 14 GB
CPU Type - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz

Issue: While I know I need a bit more RAM, the *obscene* amount the game is using makes it impossible to play for more than an hour without rebooting my whole system. 8 to 12 gb commit at any given time. Obviously higher in "populated" game areas. One chrome browser and the game is unplayable. If this is a me-problem, I'm happy to accept input.

Great responses, everyone.
From what I can see in these responses, it looks like it's going to be a matter of optimization then?
Some of you have some great hardware that's more than capable of breezing through games with similar specs.
That gives me a lot of hope for things getting smoothed out if setups with an even higher than recommended baseline are bottoming out on performance.

Specs: RTX 2080 SUPER (8GB), i7 9700k, 16GB RAM.

I experience full crashed and severe visual lag when playing in 'vulkan'. When I switch to Dx11 everything runs just fine.

I have similar stutters with vulkan when playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Those stutters were so bad I refunded the game via uPlay.

Not sure if this is a 'simple' optimisation issue or something else is causing many people to have these stuttering problems.


Other than that, the game in dx11 has impressed so far. Let's hope these little hiccups get ironed out!

You sure dx11 is fine or just better then vulkan?Personally for me vulkan gets you stutters but dx11 doesnt but dx11 you can kinda feel the frametime is off when moving the camera in the open world.Do you notice the camera a bit bumpy when moving it around alot?Imagine moving the camera (w,a,s,d keys) without any shock absorbers over a slightly bumpy road as an example.Mainly noticeable in the open world with lots of things rendering like tree,environment,buildings.

You are right, dx11 feels a little jagged and crude, but I was simply speaking in graphical stability terms

I think that the difference between the two is going to depend on the particulars of everyone's setup, and some people will have more luck with one than the other.
I'd be happy with just one of those options ending up great down the line.

For me on my old computer built in 2014 (EVGA X99 FTW (150-HE-E997), i7 5820k, 4x8GB DDR4-2400 Crucial Ballistix Sport (BLS8G4D240FSA) in quad channel, EVGA 3GB 780TI Dual Classified (03G-P4-2888-KR), win10) current vulkan perfomance is much worse than dx11. It has constant microstutters when moving/rotating camera and fps numbers dipped to uncomfortable 20ish fps values after ship prologue in most areas. When on dx11 I have no issues on ultra preset with steady 50-55 fps:


For now it looks like engine hasn't been optimized with dx12/vulkan lowlevel differences in mind yet. And vulkan implementation was just slapped on top of already existing dx11 renderer implementation without required rendering pipeline redesign. As a result it currently don't give any perfomance benefits which you would expect from lowlevel api and on contrary has the worse performance akin to wrappers.

Though mileage will slightly vary for everyone as geforce drivers generally performing worse on vulkan than radeons, especially on old cards, but performs way better on old directx apis.

I have a pretty old computer, win 7, nvidia 980 4gm, 8gb RAM and I7 4790. Tryed playing it in high spec and it was running with low fps and a lot of hiccups. Changed to medium spec and it was the same, no change in fps and amount of hiccups.

I have no idea what you just said, but if Larian reads this, I'm sure that it's going to be very helpful, lol.

So I guess we can all agree Vulkan is running really bad on most machines. My RTX2070 doesn't like it either. Had to switch to dx11 too.

Same here. My TRX2080Ti was struggling with Vulkan in 4K, getting about 23 fps. I switched to dx11, average fps now about 65-70.

Not sure if this is useful to the conversation or not, but it sounds like a lot of the issues I've been seeing while running the stadia version of the game. I just assumed it was streaming lag, but maybe their servers are having some of the same problems.

Depends on the issues. But performance wise it can be related as stadia nodes are powered by custom linux based on debian and custom amd gpus. It is also uses vulkan exclusively.

] was definitely bottoming out more with Vulkan than with DX, but I just assumed that it was my hardware.