After three years in early access,Baldur’s Gate 3is out on PC. It’s a beautiful, dense RPG with a lot of detail, but you’ll need the best settings to optimize your performance on PC.
The game runs well based on my 10 or so hours in it, and the graphics menu offers a lot of bandwidth to optimize your performance. However, the game also includes several unique settings that are hard to decipher, as well as a slew of upscaling options. In this guide, I’ll walk you through all of them, as well as the best settings to get the highest performance.
Best settings for Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3has a fairly dense graphics menu, and although there are descriptions for the various settings, they don’t fully describe what each setting does. This is a problem because there are some unique settings to the game that you won’t find in other releases. Because of that, I have a brief description of what some of the more opaque settings do along with the best settings I’ve found for the game.
That’s a lot of settings, and there’s definitely room to tweak further from here. The game also includes an auto-detect feature that will optimize your settings based on the hardware you have. It’s not perfect, but it can point you in the right direction.
For my optimized settings, I saw nearly a 16% increase in performance compared to the Ultra preset. That’s not bad considering there’s a minor impact on visual quality, as you can see in the image below.
There are some standard areas to save performance, such as Detail Distance and Shadow Quality, but the bottom four settings are where I saw the biggest improvements. Depth of Field, in particular, has a big impact on performance. The bottom four settings definitely improve the look of the game, so you should turn them on if you have performance to spare. But for those strapped for frames, these post-processing effects can save you performance without sacrificing texture and model quality as much.
It’s certainly a better trade-off visually, too. As you can see in the image above, dropping down to the Medium and Low presets massively reduces the quality ofBaldur’s Gate 3.You should avoid these presets if you can. Most rigs from the past few years shouldn’t have a problem, but if your components are multiple generations old and on the weaker side, you may have to use them.
Baldur’s Gate 3 system requirements
Like the developer’s previous games,Baldur’s Gate 3is highly scalable. You can run it on a machine that’s nearly a decade old with the minimum specs, but, as I mentioned above, a newer PC will net much better visual quality.
There are a couple of interesting notes here. First is the VRAM requirement. Several recent releases havestressed the VRAM capacityin modern GPUs, but thankfully,Baldur’s Gate 3doesn’t have the same problem. It never consumed over 8GB at the Ultra preset, while my optimized settings dropped usage to around 5GB.
Otherwise, the system requirements say that an SSD is required. The game will still work with a spinning hard drive, but you should install it on an SSD if you can. I’ll dig into that more later.
DirectX 11 vs. Vulkan in Baldur’s Gate 3
In the launcher,Baldur’s Gate 3includes two options: DirectX 11 and Vulkan. It defaults to DirectX 11 on Windows, and it will use Vulkan on all other platforms. As I’ve written about previously,Vulkan almost universallyoffers better performance than DirectX.Baldur’s Gate 3,however, is a rare exception.
Based on my testing, DirectX 11 was around 2% faster than Vulkan. That’s well within the margin of error for a game likeBaldur’s Gate 3,so it’s safe to say Vulkan andDirectXoffer identical performance. However, Vulkan provided a better 1% low frame rate, indicating that it was more consistent overall. Again, it’s a minor difference, but I’ve been running the Vulkan version personally and I suggest you do the same.
DLSS vs. FSR in Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3supports Nvidia’sDeep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)and AMD’sFidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), but there’s really only one option between them. You should use DLSS if you have an Nvidia RTX GPU. FSR is supposed to fill in the gap for other graphics cards, but it doesn’t look great inBaldur’s Gate 3.
As you’re able to see above, even at the Quality preset, FSR’s image quality is a clear step below native resolution and DLSS. It looks softer, like you’re running the game at a lower resolution, and if you turn off anti-aliasing, there’s a nasty shimmering. FSR is an option if you stick to the Quality or Ultra Quality presets, but DLSS still looks much better.
You should avoid the FSR Performance mode at all costs, though. As you can see above, it looks much softer than DLSS and native resolution, and it struggles with any fine detail. If you look at the blood stain on the beach, for example, it turns into a blocky mess with FSR, while native resolution and DLSS maintain the decal perfectly.
If you want to go in the other direction,Baldur’s Gate 3also offers Nvidia’sDeep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA). It, like DLSS, is only supported on RTX graphics cards, and it extracts slightly more detail out of the image. TAA is still the best option for most people, though.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Slow HDD Mode explained
Baldur’s Gate 3requires an SSD per the system requirements. That makes the Slow HDD Mode in the settings menu a bit of an oddity. If you’re running the game off a spinning hard drive, you should turn the feature on. However, you may have lower performance, more pop-in, and lower image quality. You should install the game on an SSD if you can.
The reason why is thatBaldur’s Gate 3streams in a lot of assets while you play. Even at the highest quality preset, you’re able to spot geometry and textures loading in as you pass them. It’s not noticeable on an SSD, but it can be a big problem on a spinning hard drive where you’ll see hitching and stutters as the new data is read off your hard drive.
That’s where the Slow HDD Mode comes in. It offloads that loading by storing more data in your system RAM and your graphics card’s VRAM. The game doesn’t normally stress these components, but the Slow HDD Mode can push them to their limits, resulting in pop-in and stutters. I recommend avoiding the Slow HDD Mode if you can.Install the game on an SSD.
