Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems My game performance is too poor

I just bought the game last night, the first login was so slow, very laggy even at very low settings. I'm using GTX 1050 with 3GB VRAM, 8GB RAM, and the CPU is i5-8400. I know my system is not that good but at least not a potato PC. Do you guys have any suggestions to increase the FPS, I played it for 4hrs so I couldn't ask for the refund, thank you for reading. I really love this game but it just drives me crazy.

Sorry to say, but with that video card you won't get far in BG3. I'd actually call it a potato.
You'd need to double the RAM as well.
Highly recommended to run the game on an SSD drive.

All you can try is set everything at their lowest setting and go the American way with "Thoughts and prayers".

Thanks for your reply. I had plan to upgrade my video card however the price of those card is too expensive at my country (ít's almost double the price for the same one at early 2021). Thank you once again, i think i will be back to this game when i get a better PC.

I would start with the memory. 8 GB is way too small nowadays. The video card should actually give you a tolerable performance, esp. if you tune down the graphics settings, or use Autodetect (I have 1070 Ti, and the game is just a wee bit laggy on highest settings).

Another important thing that you didn't mention is the type of the storage you have. Is it an old HDD (with spinning plates, you know), is it an old SATA SSD, or is it a newer NVMe SSD, configured in PCIe rather than SATA mode? The latter, the better.

The drive performance is especially critical here because you don't have enough memory, so when the game can't allocate enough RAM for itself, the OS starts swapping out some pages from memory onto disk. In this situation, a slow disk immediately becomes the main bottleneck that grinds the whole system's performance to a halt.

It's better to have enough RAM and a fast drive, of course, but if your options or budget are limited, at least one of them should be addressed:

• Install additional (or rather, replace existing) memory modules on the motherboard. This can be tricky because these days, most if not all MB manufacturers are very particular about which DIMMs can be installed onto which boards, and which slots they should go into. And I don't mean just the memory standard or clock speed or RAS / CAS latency, they usually have QVLs with specific models and configurations. Sometimes it's borderline ridiculous - I've seen situations when different DIMM kits that have exactly the same modules, one of them is on the QVL but the other isn't, simply because one of them has 2 DIMMs and another has 4. So, before you buy any extra RAM, make sure it's on your MB's QVL.
  Mixing different DIMMs is not recommended; it might work in your case, but not guaranteed to be 100% stable.
• Install an additional drive, the fastest your MB supports, and configure Windows so that its swap file is located on that drive (along with the game itself - wouldn't hurt). This is a bit more trivial, although you probably will need to go to BIOS to configure it.

Also, keep in mind that if you will decide to fiddle with the drive(s), it's possible to make your system unbootable, or worse, to lose access to all your data. So if you are going this way, make sure you have a system backup on an external drive which your system recognises as bootable. You either need to know what you are doing, or being okay with potentially reinstalling your system from scratch. Be careful out there.

My machine is even lower in stats (i.e. GTX 770, i5-4670K, only for the RAM I have twice the size), but I get pretty fair performance when using DX11 API. You have to tweak a little on the video settings: most are set to low or medium (I would not recommend using the autodetect, but to set them individually according to what video aspect is important for you.); but I have set the AMD FSR setting to ULTRA (performance impact is minimal but quality gets really pretty nice).
One hint about AMD FSR: after changing the setting here, I restart the game completely (I detected massive performance drop, after several times changing them without restart - even when AMD FSR was finally set to "Performance" or "OFF").

I was in a similar situation to yours when it came to video card and RAM (except I have a i7-7700 CPU) and upgrading from 8GB RAM to 16GB made a HUGE difference.
Some months later I installed an SSD as well and now I can run BG3 perfectly fine with custom video settings. I don't turn on all the fancy lighting and shadow effects and keep most other paramenters at medium quality with the exception of models (I hate seeing the blocky hair and beards!).
In general, the upgrade was well worth it even for performing regular pc tasks, not just for gaming it boots up in an instant!

Sorry to respond over a week after the last post, but was searching for threads on performance after just completing a patch 6 playthrough (hadn’t played since patch 4).

Performance in game was fine, but loading times were ridiculous … minutes to load a save. Then I tried using DirectX 11 rather than Vulkan after finding an old reddit thread saying it could help load times, which it didn’t AND made performance in game absolutely terrible. So while this probably is not the problem the OP has, thought I’d call out that I am getting appalling performance with DirectX 11 (with an RTX 2060 card) but fine with Vulkan.

And if anyone has spotted a more recent discussion of long load times and could point me at it that would be much appreciated. I have an SSD so that shouldn’t be the problem.

Load times have always felt kind of lengthy to me from patch to patch, so I haven't noticed a real difference there. I will say that after the latest driver update by NVIDIA my GPU has started running crazy hot while playing the game (94 degrees +). It's gotten so bad that I finally gave up the ghost and just took the cover off my case to let it breath better and that seems to have helped. I've never had this issue in previous patches and my GTX 1080 has always run BG3 like a champ on the highest settings. I've fooled around with lowering the graphics way down to see if it helps, and all that happens is that the game is more responsive but the card still runs super hot.

Thanks for your reply. Load times have never been great for me, either, but they weren’t this bad. It’s a real disincentive to trying wackier approaches, knowing that if things go horribly wrong then there’s a huge wait to try again.

I wonder whether Windows 11 could be a factor, as that’s the other thing that’s changed for me. We’ll see what happens with patch 7, and I’m also finally going to try adding some RAM as my laptop only came with 8GB, and as folk on this thread have already said that’s not much these days.

I haven’t noticed my machine getting hotter, though. That would be a worry!