I spent the entirety (and a few hours more) of the Steam refund period trying to get the game to run properly because it's a mess on anything other than systems that are well-above the recommended specs.
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Oooh, this is not good. I have been avoiding the Early Access partly because I have a slightly sub-minimal machine: i5-2400, 16 GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics, but with a very cool solid-state drive which I love. I can live without seeing ripples on pools of water, moving shadows, etc., so I was hoping there would eventually be some minimal graphics setting that I might be able to choose. Does Larian have a system compatibility check .exe file that I can run? That would be useful.
The minimal graphics settings essentially make the game look like a low-budget Playstation 1 game from an indie company. Running the game with no shadows makes the game scorchingly bright while running the game with low shadows makes the shadows have defined square edges and everything is blanketed in a blur, running low textures makes everything muddy and things barely resemble their intended appearance, and on low AA settings, the jagged edges are so pronounced that the entire landscape looks like a cubist painting.
I assumed, much like you did, that low or medium settings would just mean that everything looks relatively average, modern and at least somewhat clean, but nowhere near spectacular. The disparity between low and medium settings are the equivalent of the difference between the graphics of two full generations of consoles, and the disparity between medium and ultra settings is at least 3 generations. So essentially, the game on low is PS1, the game on medium is barely PS3, and the game on ultra would be somewhere between PS5 and PS6, as an example.
I can run the game on a combination of mostly low with some medium settings just so that it doesn't look vile, but even then, reaching 30FPS on a rig that's comparable to your specs is pushing it and only tends to happen in enclosed areas where the world isn't drawn infinitely, like caves or underground ruins. And I understand that it's a different engine and that the game is older at this point, but for comparison, I'm still able to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 at Ultra settings with everything maxed out without even the slightest hitch in the frame rate at any point (which I suspect is because the game intelligently uses a fog of war system that blacks out the scenery that's not been explored, so you don't pointlessly see the horizon for miles out like you do in BG3 when you zoom all the way in just for the sake of pretty screenshots.)
And as Larian's been woefully silent and for some reason there aren't a lot of discussions about performance because apparently everyone on these forums has a fantastic PC that's well-above recommended specs, I'm not entirely confident that any level of optimization is going to bring the game in line with its actual spec recommendations, and Larian's not going to correct it because complaints about performance are apparently rare and therefore won't get any visibility. And even if posts about performance were common, we'd never know they were being addressed because of the deafening silence.
