Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems CPU going to 100% load

I was able to play the game all through act 1-2 with only small performance dips when a Firewall was cast in a bigger fight but ever since Act 3 I keep getting strong framedrops that even affect my discord voice quality making it very robotic.
My game goes to peak at 100% CPU loadout at times with a Ryzen 9800x3d, 32gig ram on a 3060ti GPU (load 50%) causing extreme freezes and stuttering so much so, that something it seems to be bottle-necking performance on a system-wide scale and I am looking for help to fix the matter.
This is only with BG3, I can run other games without any issues.

Any pointers?
So far I deleted the LevelCache, tuned graphic settings down slightly, allocated virtual ram on an nVME and tweaked some basic stuff such as admin-game-boot etc.

I strongly doubt that my systems hardware is the problem.

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried to test if it runs better on Vulcan?

Unfortunately Baldur's Gate 3 is more CPU "heavy" in crowded places such as Act 3 but I'm also fairly certain in your case its just the game performing a little poorly after the last major patch it had.

(edit) Turn off Ambient Occlusion from the settings, this is also very resource hogging and see if that helps.

What kind of cooling system have you got, is that adequate enough for your system?

Also trying to limit your frames to something your CPU can handle like 60 should also help if its uncapped, if screen tears you just turn on vsync.

That's .... quite the CPU/GPU combination you have there..

While BG3 can indeed get a bit CPU-heavy (especially in Act III), I don't see how this config would be anything but GPU-bottlenecked in any scenario. Going by my own experiences with a somewhat comparable CPU (i7-14700KF) but a more powerful, but "reined in" GPU (I'm using the game's FPS-limiter), your CPU should pretty much just be twiddling its thumbs, waiting for you GPU to catch up. When I play at 80 or 90 FPS capped, my CPU's total load never goes much higher than 20% - outside of blink-and-you'll-miss-them peak loads that probably occur while loading saves or the game itself and which are only observable if I have HWInfo up and then check the max-values in there. Only when I remove the FPS limiter to let the GPU off the leash will my CPU get taxed more and also draw more power. I'm still not seeing anything more than, maybe, 30 to 40% tops and I don't think I've ever seen the CPU draw more than 100W for anything longer than a second or two, even if I let the game run as fast as my system allows.

That said (and keeping in mind that I don't have any experience with AMD-chips): I would probably first suspect a more fundamental problem, even though you stated that you only experience this in BG3. If it was more of a BG3-related issue, I'm sure other users with similar systems would've reported it and you would've gotten more answers in here from other folks who've experienced this behavior.

Are your BIOS, chipset drivers, etc all up to date? Are you running any sort of overclock on your CPU? Have you stress-tested the CPU to see if it runs other, more CPU-heavy tasks reliably and consistently? I'd probably start by making sure everything is up-to-date, then disable any OC and then do a 10+ min run in Cinebench to check stability and also to see if the CPU delivers its expected performance.

I'd also check Windows Reliability report for any recurring errors your system might be encountering. Plus things like SFC or DISM to find and repair any errors in your system files.