Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General New system requirements: 150 GB available space and SSD required

I have geforce RTX 3060, and everything is on high and ultra. One setting is on 'fake fullscreen', don't know what that means.

That means it displays as Fullscreen, but in actuality; as far as the comoputer is concerned, it runs in a window. Contrary to True Fullscreen.

My problem there is that I can't replace the video card in my laptop, and considering I meet or exceed the rest of the recommended specs, I just can't justify the cost of a new laptop just for a better video card, when mine seems to run just fine, even if not on Ultra settings.

I'd like to, I can afford it, but I can't rationalize it to be honest 🤷

I get ya. A 1060 on a Lappie is cutting it, though, that's essentially a 960 which is the minimum requirement. It'll run, but it won't be the happiest lappie in town.

It runs very smooth on high for me, I hope it stays that way with the release version. Don't want the bother of buying a new one, considering the regional prices being very volatile atm.

If it's very smooth, you'll be good. If anything, everything is more optimized come release. They were rahter picky on releasing it on other platforms for this very reason, so I expect it to be fine.

HDDs are a huge bottleneck on system performance when you are processing large data volumes, so it's hardly a surprise that software is increasingly designed with SDDs in mind.

If you have a great deal of patience, and like looking at loading screens, area transitions are OK on HDDs, but only if the game assumes the use of HDDs in its design. But, increasingly, cut scenes and cinematic dialog require enough data that the game experience without an SSD will be quite poor, and the only "optimisation" that would improve this is to heavily reduce the quality of the assets being loaded. More recent developments, like auto-LOD systems ( e.g. Nanite in Unreal Engine 5 ) will continue to ramp up the data rates needed from storage devices beyond what a pure HDD can sustain.

If you are not using SSDs in your system, it is the single most effective quality of life upgrade you can apply. Even the worst SATA SSD is 10-100 times quicker than a normal HDD, depending on what it is doing. If you are able to use NVMe SSDs, the benefit is much greater, although they are more expensive. At the current prices you can get SATA SSDs for about $50/1TB, which is worth the investment, even on older systems.

As @Icelyn says, you dont need to discard your older drives, just add an SSD, and shuffle the games you are currently playing onto the SSD.

The cheapest laptop I can find that has an 8 GB VRAM video card costs $1560... and it's identical in every other spec to my current laptop, less actually with the SSD, (it's a 1 GB SSD, I have 2 GB SSD).

Same RAM.
Same Intel i7 CPU.
Same CPU speed.
Etc, etc... only a better video card... so in net effect I'd be paying $1560 for a video card, lol 😂🤣.

That would not be such a wise investment, anyway. I would never get a new lappie unless it exceeds the current one by a *ton*. Or the current one outright breaks, in that case I need one.

Yeah, that's why I used laugh emojis... ain't no way, lol.

Now THIS... this exceeds my current specs by a ton, but it's near $4k... so I can buy it, and my wife removes my testicles, and I find a new place to live... or stick with what I've got, remain intact and happily married, lol.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1PK6KS...psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Yeah, I'd have the wife, too.

That's a dodgy description of a laptop, though:

Graphics Card Description: Dedicated -- Yes, but is it Blue? Or hairy? What is it, dammit?

Edir: Oh, hang on; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 in the title. That's actually a monster of a card, I have that one.

You're not helping, lol.

Think of your wife. She's good for you.

Marriage is temporary
Graphics are forever

Wait… was it the other way around?

I wonder how many years I could get out of the laptop I linked above before I'd need a newer, better one for games coming out at that future time? 🤔🤔

I hear what you're saying. We're all here for you. I'm so sorry your marriage had to end this way.

ETA: I had to recently purchase a new computer myself to play this game, which happened after Stadia shut down. I found that desktop prices were much more reasonable for comparable stats.

So now I have my older i7 workstation laptop and a new desktop PC that easily handles BG3.

BWAHAHAHA...

30 years of marriage, 21 yr old son graduating from college in May 2024... we had a good run 🤣😂

Steam says SSD required. This web site does not say that. https://baldursgate3.game/

Or I am missing something.

Steam is wrong, you don't NEED an SSD to run this game however you do need a SSD to run Fuckpunk after the lastest patch so that will be the page they copy pasted from

to be clear, a SSD is normally better so its a good idea but no not needed

I have an SSD. Not a top-of-the-line one, but an SSD. Point of my comment was that Larian says it's not a requirement and Steam says it is.