Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Game performance suddenly took a nosedive

Hey, so I've been running this game without any issues for weeks and today it just suddenly went bad for me. It became very laggy and glitchy, areas suddenly take a lot of time to render, character models suddenly became a lot lower quality without me altering settings at all and I don't know what might have caused this.

Any ideas?
Everything was seamless before today.

When this happens to me, I usually puzzle over it for too long then realise my laptop has become unplugged and it’s trying to save battery power. But not everyone is as much of a muppet as me .

Have there been any operating system or driver updates? Have you swapped from Vulkan to DX11 or vice versa?

I checked everything out, including what you just said and none of those are the issue. My friend with whom I play multiplayer is telling me that there must have been a visual update or omething because the lighting within the game looks markedly different. Could it be possible that there was a minor update that changed things up?

Not that I’ve noticed, though I’ve just seen what looks like some test achievements in Steam that I’ve never spotted before. Were they always there?

If you’ve not already tried it, then it might be worth verifying your game files in case something has somehow become corrupted.

That probably exhausts my ideas, but if no one else has better ones and the problem persists, it might be worth contacting Larian support at https://larian.com/support/baldur-s-gate-3#modal.

Oh, one more thing. Is it definitely just BG3 that’s impacted or are any other games struggling too? I had an issue with the Game DVR in Windows 11 that made BG3 run extremely poorly in DX11 mode, and also affected Solasta and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though not Mass Effect Legendary Edition (which I think were all the games I happened to have installed at the time). I don’t think your problem can possibly be that, given there’s no reason that should suddenly start happening after a few weeks even if you’re using Windows 11, I just mention it in case impact on other games or lack thereof is diagnostically useful.

nothing has been added no but I'll guess your pals system is much better than yours?
try stating a single player game with low-med settings

Sorry for replying only now.

I have no idea what happened, from one day to the next the game just suddenly doesn't run like it used to, rendering became incredibly slow and BG3 is the only game that is affected. I even updated all my drivers.
No other game has any problems like this. I will give this a rest for a few days and try again. It's not exactly a new laptop, and I've been considering buying a new one soon anyway, so by the time BG3 comes out in full I will probably have a brand new gig.

Thanks for all your help

I had the same thing happen. Game performing like absolute garbage and no setting change, no amount of closing stuff, no amount of updating or rolling back drivers helped. Even tried a backup clean install of win 10 I keep on a second SSD - same thing. To be clear when I say "no setting change" helped - I mean it was still running terribly lowering it to 720p low preset. In fact, performance seemed almost quality-setting-agnostic as cranking everything up didn't hurt it either.

Modest setup with an i7 10700k, 64 GB ram(yes, xmp enabled), 3070 and an nvme ssd (yes it's not more than half full, and yes I've trimmed it)... would start at reasonable fps and rapidly drop towards 15 fps in some of the worst offending areas (crowded locations and locations with lots of dynamic sounds/conversations - goblin camp, druid grove, and the beach for some reason). Elsewhere it was closer to 25 fps ~ 30 fps. Had been running at ~119 (I capped it) but after the last hotfix it was just running awful. If I loaded the game in an uncrowded interior, sometimes I'd have playable framerates and responsiveness for up to 30 minutes, then it would tank as soon as I went outside or got near any npcs.

Used resource monitor and task manager to check for useage and maybe bottlenecking behavior. Other than bizarrely low useage of both CPU (~33-40% peak) and GPU (both utilization % and memory useage were consistently under half) - nothing appeared to be causing the slow down. The weirdly low utilization made it seem like windows 10 decided to treat the game like a background process instead of an application/game though.

Trying things like windows game mode did nothing, but manually setting the priority of the process to "high" and core affinity to exclude cores 1,3,5, and 7 returned performance to what I expected. Priority helped a little bit and I can understand that on some level kind of, but I'm really not sure why core affinity helped (it was responsible for about half my return to expected performance.) I vaguely understand that what I did by setting the affinity like that was prevent the game from running it's threads on both logical cores that make up single physical cores, but not why that helped.

Based on resource utilization and performance - and the fact that changing priority/affinity had such a big effect for me (it almost always seems trivial at best in most games) it really does seem like windows 10 scheduler decided all of the sudden that BG3.exe and BG3_dx11.exe were a background process...