Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Optimization: What are the odds?

This is my first time ever diving into an Early Access title, so I'm not entirely familiar with the priorities and processes involved from a developer standpoint.
I'm hoping that some of you with enough EA experiences in other games might be able to clue me in on this.

How important is optimization during the EA process? Is it something that's typically worked on incrementally as new patches hit, or is it typically reserved for the end closer to a full release?
I know that there are situations where the minimum and recommended specs for games can come down.
As this is Larian's first crack at the Divinity 4.0 engine, is it safe to assume that things will be ironed out dramatically, or is it more likely that all of the kinks and hiccups on lower-to-mid range systems likely to remain in retail?

Of course I ask because although I clear minimum specs, I'm not quite at recommended specs, and I've had a devil of a time running the game with a decent framerate without dropping every available option to low or lowest.
I can certainly just play the game on low settings, but muddy textures and blatantly visible dot matrices don't exactly do justice to the experience.

Anyone have any solid guesses from their prior Early Access experiences as to how optimization may turn out in the end?

A whole lot.
For instance if DOS 2 in anything to go by, you could expect the AI to be significantly faster at deciding moves by the end of the development.

That's great news because I'd certainly like to see those moves resolved faster.
Using D:OS2 as the example, was performance smoothed out a lot as well that you can recall?

They've had this issue with the prior games in EA and cleaned it up on release. I would be really surprised if there is an issue here because one would like to think it just gets better every iteration.

I was more specifically looking for information on optimization as far as performance goes, not so much tightening mechanics to be smoother. Although I'm glad to hear that those will improve too.

I don't know when will they do that, but in early versions there are less optimizations usually, because why do it when things get replaced and need optimized again.

I can run this game fine as it is, with no FPS drops, but with lesser hardware could be problems maybe. I have everything on highest at 4K native resolution, but I'm still using Frame Rate Limiter to keep my system as quiet as possible, these kind of games don't need high frame rates IMO.
So try to use the in-game Frame Rate Limiter option to lower frame rate as much as you can accept, maybe not lower than 20-24, I'm at 50 but that's high end system. 30 should be fine, I remember few years ago I limited most of my games to 30 FPS and was just fine. Now I play things which need about 45 at least being action games and skills won't be smooth lower, that's why I'm at 50, but BG3 is fine at 30.

If the in-game frame limiter doesn't work, use Nvidia Inspector or RivaTuner Statistics Server (just the frame rate limit feature, rest turn off)

Then adjust the rest, maybe google each setting on what they do if you need, because lowering shadows help by far more than low textures (only lower these if not enough texture memory on GPU), same with other features. If everything is at lowest, including frame rate limit, then nothing else you can do.

Unless you're having trouble targeting a steady 60fps minimum, I'd investigate possible system issues. Whilst they've argued system requirements may decrease as Early Access processes, performance wise it is actually quite decent already considering EA . (German mag PC games had also done a couple of benchmarks.) https://www.pcgames.de/Baldurs-Gate...tuning-tipps-benchmarks-ssd-hdd-1359551/

As did these guys
https://www.game-debate.com/news/29...phics-card-benchmarks-and-api-comparison

The recommended GTX 1060, which is only this much faster than the minimum, is enough for Ultra details even at 4K. A GTX 1650 mobile was decent enough for ~60 fps medium, my GTX 1050ti which is actually below requirements slightly still churns out a ~45 fps average on medium with a couple additional shadows enabled on 1080p.


The loading times can be quite long though on a regular SSD.

Limiting the frames actually helped substantially.
When I first started, I set it to 60 and called it a day. Bumping it down has actually helped quite a bit for my aging rig. Thanks for the tip!

My system has typically been fine, but this game has proven just how much it has aged.
I was really just looking for some hope that things would level out across the board enough for lower-to-mid-tier systems will see a boost in playability.
Honestly, I think if Auto-Detect settings worked instead of defaulting to Ultra, it would help a lot of people.

Oh yeah, given my gfx card is slightly below specs as said, I was a bit disheartened at first, at the game was running ultra on start-up. That optimization is still a process is also posted below the specs on the Steam store page. But personally I'm pretty fine as is already -- will swap my card for a new one next year anyways sometime. It's still at least a year until BG3 full comes out too!

It's more about singe core CPU speed what is limiting the game, not the GPU, so don't just buy a new graphics card and expect miracles.

While I can run this at native 2560 x 1440 (4K) @ 165 refresh with about 140 FPS, in some scenes the FPS would drop under 45 FPS, also if I move away quickly the camera to scout, in certain regions.
If you want to keep very high FPS all the time, a far better single core CPU is needed (there's none, unless you can go above far above 5 MHz with lab level cooling)
1080 GTX or similar or better can run this GPU-wise at 4K just fine, and when the frame rate drops, the bottleneck is still the CPU.

60 FPS is not needed, there are no fast moving scenes or objects here. 30 FPS is fine and the system coolers can slow down at 30 FPS enough to reduce background noise a lot, as well the power consumption is less.
There could be a catch here though: I have FreeSync enabled and working in "fake fullscreen" (aka windowed fullscreen mode), so I don't have stutter even when the FPS goes down to about 20. Without FreeSync/G-Sync could be annoying if the FPS goes down, but that will happen anyway no matter if you limit frame rate or not.

Don't forget to google and learn about each graphics options, if possible from a good source like Nvidia, because one can still have good looking graphics on low.
Set shadows to very low, but textures try to keep at medium (maybe even high) while giving up on other parts. Lighting, effects and shadows are the most demanding parts, that's why hardware based Ray Tracing will help a lot, but will take few years until the price of those will be low enough to be adopted mainstream.

As for CPUs: Larian have posted on these boards that they had tested a CPU as old as an i5 2400 for a 30 fps minimum. They went with a higher tier CPU on the Intel front in their specs "to be safe". Still a faster CPU than the FX 4350 minimum, mind.

When the OP is talking about bad performance and only being able to play the game at low settings, I had assumed something in the under 30 fps range -- there are guys with i7s and GTX 1060s in the technical forums that reported such frame rates (I think even sub 20 at times), which must have something to do with the systems somehow. Perhaps overheating due to no FPS lock enabled?