Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Patch 3 Optimization 1st Impersions

I was having a pretty consistent 30fps throughout the game with occasional dips here and there, which was a bit better than what I experienced in previous builds (especially in the Druid Groove), but the blighted village area runs around about 18-25 while wandering, and going as low as 16fps in certain instances. Reload times have also gotten worse as I progressed through the game. 5-10 sec reload times while in the tutorial which is pretty close to my reload times in a heavily modded DOS2 campaign. Druid Grove onward I'm going upwards of 30+ second load times. I am above the recommended specs, and I've turned several things down, so the game really shouldn't be running like this.

GeForce GTX 1060

Pixel Shader: 5.1
Vertex Shader: 5.1
Dedicated Video RAM 6.0 GB
Ram: 16 GB
OS: Windows 10
Free Disk Space: 803 GB

Video Settings
Resolution: 1920/1280 (16:9) 75Hz
Displaymode: Fullscreen
VSync
Framerate Cap enabled: yes
Framerate Cap: 30
Model Quality: High
Instance distance: low
Texture Quality: Medium
Texture Filtering: Anisotropic x4
Lightning: high
Shadows: enabled
Light Shadows: enabled
Shadow Quality: Medium
Anti-aliasing: FXAA
Ambient Occlusion: disabled
Depth of Field: Circular
God Rays: enabled
Bloom: enabled
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening: enabled
Contrast: default
Surface scattering: disabled

As a test I ran the game with what Geforce tells me is optimal, and what the in game auto detects says I should be using, which is all ultra with everything as high as it will go (they are the same thing, this has been a problem for pretty much every Larian game for me). My 1st impressions, and my max settings test, are done running around with a party of my half-drow character, Gale, Shadowheart, Astarion, and my warlock's pet quasit The games runs smooth for the tutorial, for the opening beach section, the crashed spell-jammer area, and general wandering through the wilderness with occasional hiccups here and there like before, but I start seeing problems while inside the Druid Groove though not as bad as I was expecting for patch 3 on max settings. In the groove it was a minimum of 15fps near where the children are being trained, but mainly it hovered around 22-28 everywhere else. The Blighted Village was as low as 13 fps, and hovered around 18-23 while wandering. Goblin camp, which I was expecting to run the worst actually was smoother than the groove hitting a min of 18fps, and staying around 23-28 while wandering. I am happy to see improvements in optimization since the last time I played, and I hope by patch 4 the game will run at a consistent 30fps in most areas of the game, and I hope this post helps you in optimizing the game further.

Small Update: The Swap is probably the most well optimized area in the game. I had what felt like 20+ characters on screen during the mud mephit encounter, and I don't think it dropped below 30fps once. If the whole game could run like that consistently, and the load times could be fixed to be as quick as DOS2's (DOS2DE on max settings, and many mods, only takes me 4secs to reload) I'd be so happy.

Another small Update: I switched the game from Direct X11 to Vulcan, and while not perfect, its way more in line with what I'd expect the game to run like at this stage of development. I'm seeing 30fps across the board, with rare momentary dips to 25, including in areas like the blighted village and goblin camp, which ran hideously on my machine when I used Direct X11. Settings I was using were the same as the initial post except a few settings:

Instance distance: from low to medium
Texture Filtering: from Anisotropic x4 to x16

I'll be using Vulcan going forward up until something goes really wrong with it, and it forces me back to using DX11.