Baldur's Gate runs horribly

[Arian]

Hey Everyone

I have an AMD Radeon Rx 6700 XT and a Ryzen 9 3900x with 64 gb of ram. Baldur's Gate runs horribly even at 1080. I get these weird sudden drops to 4 - 10 fps and I constantly get frame drops. It doesn't happen in any other game. All of my drivers are up to date I even went ahead and reinstalled my drivers but it still isn't fixed.

[Cirrus]

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Originally posted by Cirrus:

Because you say ram size before ram speed I assume that you have not paid attention to it. This game is much more interested in ram speed than size. And as zen 2 is not blazing fast cpu it needs very well optimized ram speeds to maintain good internal bus speeds inside cpu.

That is my guess atm.

Zen 2 is indeed, not blazing fast but should run this fgame no problem, I have a R5 3600 myself and have next to no issues and my ram is not blazing fast (DDR4 3000).

I think theres either something running in the background that eats a ton of CPU ressources or another bottleneck somewhere but his zen 2 12 cores should do OK in this game.

Core count is not substitute for single core perf. Main threads of this game wanted to use all ST perf of 5950x earlier. Now it seems to be better with latest patches. And that dude has worse gpu than me back then so it reduces cpu load also.

[FuNb0Y86]

Originally posted by CliffyWalk:

Started a second campaign after a small pause. Suffering from the same problem. Runs fine for a few moments, then the fps dips to single digits, then returns back to normal for a few. You know, hitching.

Now i will admit i´m running this on a cheap all-AMD gaming laptop — a "potato" if you will (Ryzen 5600, 6500M) — but i played through the game once just fine on release, and i have always kept the graphic settings to an appropriate level, disabling anything too intensive.

I have also tried a bunch of graphic settings while trying to find out what might be causing this, with little luck. But perhaps someone has better luck analyzing this issue.

Judging by the comments in this thread that manage to avoid being snide, it would seem like an issue with AMD GPUs specifically. Feels like the game is buffering something, so perhaps a (graphics) memory issue, or driver related?

We're getting GPU bottleneck for some weird reason. The way I solved the issue for the most part is switching to Vulkan, using FSR 2.2, and releasing frame limiter. Kill any and all metrics in adrenaline, kill all metrics running in the background, and trying toggling freesync on and off. Fullscreen with freesync on works for me.

I am running a Ryzen 9 3950X Alienware R10 @ 4.3ghz PBO with a flagship RX 6900 XT, and 32 gigs of RAM, and SSD on Windows 10. I still get slowdowns or load chugs when new scenery pops up for the first time, and sometimes when exiting or entering a cut scene; this will happen to me on Vulkan or DX11, so there is no getting around it so far as I have tested. These issues will happen on any quality setting and frame rate, but are vastly reduced when playing with FSR 2.2.

My reasoning for thinking it's a bottleneck is evidence from a system analysis I did while playing some time back. I noticed that while the GPU was running at 100 percent, the VRAM held steady at a low level. I think the numbers were something like 4gb/12gb being used, and at the same time the CPU was under 12 percent on all 16 cores. The active cores were running BG3, but they were only just under 30-50 percent on 4 cores while a main core was running the game at 100 percent. It's weird for a CPU intensive game to not draw more resources from less than 6 cores, even in DX11. I also noticed that some of the compute effects were being offloaded onto the CPU, and this might be where the chunky frame rates are coming from.

I gave my metrics and info to Larian, but it's been months since then. They keep getting better at it though; now I can play on PC again, whereas before I couldn't stand it. I had to buy the game on PS5 just to try and finish my save game it was so bad. So, even if things look bleak now, just know that they are getting better. The performance for custom AMD rigs is getting better.

[Deutscher]

For me, changing the anti-aliasing mode improved the performance greatly.

[FuNb0Y86]

Originally posted by Deutscher:

For me, changing the anti-aliasing mode improved the performance greatly.

Sorry for the double post, but yes I noticed this as well. FSR 2.2 disables AA, and for the better. FSR 2.2 has a far superior AA mode than TAA. It WILL reduce the strain for particle effects and cases where your rig stutters for compute effects and lense effects. For some reason I keep forgetting the name of the setting.

[SimranZenov]

I solve this issue by not buying AMD

[Sevati]

You are getting a lot of complicated feedback. Some may be relevant some notso much and shots in the dark. Some descending into AMD vs Intel or Radeon vs Nvidia ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

A little more sysinfo would be nice.

Your system is a bit underpowered and on my older computer with a 6900XT and lesser processor had issues in Act 3, but none really show stopping before hand.

I was able to run the game decently at 1440p, if and only if....

-I disabled the Larian Launcher, or close it once the game has launched. This sounds dumb and unlikely, but just do it and see. Its a very simple fix and tends to fix many people's problems with perf in the game.

-If in Act 3, disable Dynamic NPCs.

Finally... What may really help you given your CPU has always has lagged in the single thread perf and 1080p perf is to ...

... bump the CPU priority of the application up to High, no higher, no real time, just switch it from normal to high. You can create a registry fix for that so you don't have to always manually bump it up each time you run the .exe.

Many people on older architectures and Win 10 are seeing CPU bound issues and the game doesn't multi-thread very well, if at all, and this can help some whom the disable launcher fix doesn't help and who aren't running the game off a spinning disk drive.

Hopefully for someone like you, those xbox changes to memory will help when that patch hits the rest of the builds and is released into broad adoption.

If you are running this game off a spinning disk hard drive, you will be having problems with perf.

Those weird drops are likely loading assets as you move around in the world. Take a look at drive usage when you play the game, its clear as day and very extreme.

That aspect was never really optimized in this game until the Xbox problems and need to launch there required them to figure some things out.

This game doesn't really use much active RAM because it needs to run on consoles. It swaps pages in a very extreme manner and moves loads of data from disk constantly especially when you move your characters.

This may be and is likely why you may be getting CPU bound, or if you are running on a spinning disk hard drive and not an SSD or PCI NVME based drive. You can try the slow drive option in the settings, no idea if that really helps as I have no computers in my life anymore with spinning disks save a home NAS with a few hundred TB of striped storage.

If your system pagefile and the game is on a spinning disk....sorry to say that's likely the big problem and your main bottleneck.

Windows does not, and has never, managed memory very well for something like this by default as its settings are more general purpose for typical users.

[Sheol Raver]

Runs smooth for me. Intel I5 12600K (slight overclock) and RTX3070 at 3440 x 1440. Except for Act 3, I had to adjust some of the graphics settings down from ultra because I got a little frame rate drop. Act 3 seems either more demanding or less optimized. Act1+2 ran like butter.

[LordOfTheBread]

Originally posted by Cirrus:

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Zen 2 is indeed, not blazing fast but should run this fgame no problem, I have a R5 3600 myself and have next to no issues and my ram is not blazing fast (DDR4 3000).

I think theres either something running in the background that eats a ton of CPU ressources or another bottleneck somewhere but his zen 2 12 cores should do OK in this game.

Core count is not substitute for single core perf. Main threads of this game wanted to use all ST perf of 5950x earlier. Now it seems to be better with latest patches. And that dude has worse gpu than me back then so it reduces cpu load also.

And yet I can reach 60fps average with a 6 cores of the same generation running at stock and teh same GPU in .... 1440p high.

Theres clearly something else than his CPU/GPU causing problems here.

[Vakula]

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Originally posted by Cirrus:

Core count is not substitute for single core perf. Main threads of this game wanted to use all ST perf of 5950x earlier. Now it seems to be better with latest patches. And that dude has worse gpu than me back then so it reduces cpu load also.

And yet I can reach 60fps average with a 6 cores of the same generation running at stock and teh same GPU in .... 1440p high.

Theres clearly something else than his CPU/GPU causing problems here.

Did you do PBO 2 and curve optimizer?

[LordOfTheBread]

Originally posted by Vakula:

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

And yet I can reach 60fps average with a 6 cores of the same generation running at stock and teh same GPU in .... 1440p high.

Theres clearly something else than his CPU/GPU causing problems here.

Did you do PBO 2 and curve optimizer?

Nope.

[Vakula]

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Originally posted by Vakula:

Did you do PBO 2 and curve optimizer?

Nope.

try it, might make a difference

[LordOfTheBread]

Originally posted by Vakula:

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Nope.

try it, might make a difference

I'll try, thanks, eventho I don't really have complaints with around 60fps average. BG3 ain't a multiplayer shooter needing lighntning fast reflexes.

Still, if I get a few free frames I won't complain so thanks. also plan to swap for a 5800X3D later this month tho :D

[Vakula]

Originally posted by LordOfTheBread:

Originally posted by Vakula:

try it, might make a difference

I'll try, thanks, eventho I don't really have complaints with around 60fps average. BG3 ain't a multiplayer shooter needing lighntning fast reflexes.

Still, if I get a few free frames I won't complain so thanks. also plan to swap for a 5800X3D later this month tho :D

In case you do it, this is the best guide available
https://youtu.be/dU5qLJqTSAc?si=j_Iye-_Dj8snO7MX

I used this one

[Anima Mundi]

Originally posted by Sevati:

This may be and is likely why you may be getting CPU bound, or if you are running on a spinning disk hard drive and not an SSD or PCI NVME based drive. You can try the slow drive option in the settings, no idea if that really helps

This is a very important point, hence i mentioned it as well.
Very few games nowadays that have these sort of graphic quality will run well on a Hard drive.

Besides that, this user's whole comment is the most useful so far so i suggest OP take a look. However without more info and response, i doubt you'll get anything solved

[LordOfTheBread]

Thanks. I'll take a look at it.