Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Baldur's Gate 3 100% SSD usage causing freezing

So I have noticed that every so often (sometimes more frequently than not. One moment it could be every 20 - 30 minutes, the next moment within a couple minutes. Seems to be random), BG3 would freeze for roughly 20 or so seconds, then resume. When I pulled up the Task Manager, I noticed that the reason why it does that is it suddenly spikes my Hard Drive (SSD) usage to 100%!!! This IS the only game this happens to, and Steam and my games are on this drive and all run perfectly fine, save for Baldur's Gate III. I have 131 GB free on the drive now after removing some things and uninstalling some other games, and it STILL does this. Freezes (because Hard Drive spikes to 100% usage), and then resumes. Please Help!!!

My PC rig:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
GeForce RTX 2060
16 GB Ram
2560 x 1440, 59Hz

I'm seeing the same thing.

Win 10 Pro Build 20175 (insider, slow)
i7-7700K,
32GB RAM,
1.5TB Samsung EVO Pro,
GeForce RTX 2080 8GB, 2560 x 1080,

Yep, I reported those freezes a while ago, but didn't catch it red-handed using the SSD (at some point I was wondering whether my SSD was faulty).

What is surprising is that it happens anytime, even in the main menu. Or repeatedly on the same spot when the party hasn't moved one inch (I was sorting out my inventory). I have accepted those frequent freeze incidents as bad optimization or bug, but there was no reaction from the support at this point, only confirmation from other people who had the same issues.

If it's misusing or abusing the SSD though, maybe I'll wait for a while for this to be resolved before touching BG3 again (it's such a pain to start it with the "won't start" bug anyway, plus the GOG update who corrupted it and requires a complete re-install...).

i7-4770K, 16 GB RAM, Samsung SSD 850 Pro
GTX 980 Ti

Interesting. Me and my friend were experiencing a similar issue - every 1 to 10 minutes, the game would freeze for 5 seconds and then resume.

He is on an SSD and I'm not. We didn't check the hard-drives, but we did notice that when we experience a freeze, the CPU would jump up to 100% and the GPU down to 0%.

I believe the issue started since hotfix #3.

Yesterday we managed to fix the freezing by disabling the Steam overlay for the game, and setting the exe files to 'run as administrator'.

I opened a thread about it here just a short while ago: http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=701410#Post701410

Might be worth trying.

Best of luck!

The plot thickens.

I'm using GOG, not Steam, and since there is this bug that prevents many users from launching the game from GOG or Steam, I have to start the executable directly with admin rights (bg3_11.exe) plus a few other cantrips such as drawing a pentagram, praying and lighting candles. But even without the extra Steam/Galaxy layers, I still get those frequent freezes. So if you don't have them anymore, it means there must be different reason for them, the Steam overlay but also other causes.

Wonder if they're using PhysFS (fairly common for games with a .pak format). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcuPIVKNSN0

I switched the game to windowed mode and found that when the freeze happens, clicking to focus another window fixes the game instantly. I have the game set to stop playing sound when the game isn't focused... And since its frequently loading voices.pak...

- Turn "Mute sound when not focused" off
-> No 10-20s freezes,

- Turn "Mute sound when not focused" on
-> Intermittent 10-20s freezes,
-> Freeze can be thawed by sending a WM_FOCUS event to the game's message pump

I had the same problem and my SSD just broke, it has some clusters damaged and now windows slow down and then freze after a couple of minutes, i really hope the problems are not connected!

not sure if the 2 things are connected as the game is installed in D and the damage is in C. i only have 8gb ram, so may be a problem of memory swap.

That's pretty interesting!
I'll have to test that, ... once the huge download is finished, have to reinstall everything after the "little incident" they induced with patch#1.

Did you get a chance to test it? I also have "Mute sound when not focused" off and haven't experienced and freezes myself but this is a bit worrying. I mean I expect the game to have issues at this stage (broken quests, graphic glitches etc.) but the game causing hardware issues...ouch!

It finally downloaded, took the whole day because the servers are very slow atm. I played a bit but haven't had any freezing with the option still enabled. Once I'm able to reproduce it, I'll test by disabling the option. Sometimes the problem just doesn't occur, it probably takes more playing to get it but I don't have the time right now.

Hardware issues? You mean you're concerned by the 100% SSD usage? That'd be concerning for sure.

I eventually experienced the stutters in both windowed and "fake fullscreen" (known as 'borderless windowed' to the rest of the universe).

However, I've consistently freed myself from the freezes by pressing alt-tab or clicking another window.

Since update 1, I haven't experienced the problem yet.

My game repeatedly freezes for a few seconds, it's very annoying. Also running on an SSD. Turning off "Mute sound when not focused" and changing from full screen hasn't helped.

That is truly amazing about disabling sound when not in focus. I just did it and sat on the Main Menu street for quite some time and it didn't FREEZE LOL!!!!! I didn't get the chance to play it yet, but honestly, it would normally use SSD to 100% and freeze, no sound, even in the menu screen. So that is a very positive sign that it fixed it. I'll know more once I start a new game (new update, a big one), and see if it still does it during gameplay, but I'm super hopeful. Just for the record, even AFTER the big update today, I went into the game (before I did what you suggested) and sure enough, it just froze, no sound for about 10 seconds or so in the main menu. I came on here and saw I had some replies to by question, and did what you said, and no FREEZING . So huge thank you for that and Merry Christmas !

Happens to me too.

Try under the options (audio i think) to disable sound when not in focus. Uncheck that and it seemed to make the freezing issue go away. At least for the main menu. It would actually do that sound freezing just sitting in the main menu, and now it does not. I'll do some further testing. It was kfsone who recommended to try this and it worked! Merry Christmas to you, by the way. Hope you are doing well for the Holidays.

EDIT:
NEVERMIND :-(. It didn't work, it still does that pause garbage. It really is, at random....FIX THIS LARIAN!!!

Here is what happens!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9ccQsxxBmA&feature=youtu.be

Still not fixed

This is still an issue in 2023. The game freezes every few minutes with 100% CPU usage.
I'm running Win 10 pro (latest version)
32GB RAM
NVIDIA GF RTX 3060 12GB memory

I've performed the following:
3 complete reinstalls and rebooted after each uninstall/reinstall.
6 file integrity verifications.
Disabled the Steam overlay.
Disabled cloud save.
Gave the Larilauncher.exe admin rights.
Gave the bg3.exe and the bg3_dx11.exe admin rights.
Disabled mute sound when active.
Disabled Autosave.
Switching from Fake Fullscreen to Fullscreen had no effect and still froze.
No Framerate Cap enabled.

Today when I attempted to launch the game through Steam, the Larian Launcher for BG3 was completely blank and I had to use the bg3.exe launcher instead.

I'm not sure what else I can try at this point. This is my first game by Larian and I'm really enjoying Baldur's Gate III. The constant freezing issues are almost enough to cancel out that enjoyment when every few minutes everything just dead stops and rips you right out of the immersion.