Do I met the minimum requirements for this game? CPU advice?

[SwordAtSea]

Hey, so I downloaded this game and love it so much, I don't think I've ever had this much fun playing a fantasy game. But the game really does struggle and crashes constantly and is very slow to load. I lowered all the graphics I could to low. but little help. I've played over 30 hours and I don't know if the game is getting more intensive but it appears to be getting slower/crashing more/getting more frustrating playing this game.

Now I'm trying to check if my PC meets the system requirements and I'm not sure if it does.

I currently have:

AMD Ryzen 5 3550H with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx,
8gb Ram,
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Minimum system requirements on steam:
Intel Core i5 4690/ AMD FX 8350
RAM: 8 GB
Graphics card: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)

Now I'm not a computing expert, I did some research when I purchased this laptop in late 2019 and it seemed to be a good mid CPU for what I wanted to do. But what is FX 8350, that doens't seem to be produced anymore. But then what is the equivalent? Do I meet the system requirements or not? I've ran two different website's, and one said I do meet the minimum requirements and one said I didn't.

If I do meet the minimum requirements, how can I improve the performance of this game?

I'm just asking for advice. I know this is a weird forum, but I don't know anyone IRL to help me and I'm struggling to understand what is the order of Ryzen CPUs to even understand what i have in comparison to the system requirements and the new Ryzen CPUs listed on sites like Argos and Amazon.

[nurby]

You should be fine
Just dont expect to run on high settings. If you are struggling with low settings allready then maybe its time to upgrade in the future.

But just hang on in there in patch 2 Larian is fixing performance issues so that could improve situation.

Allso run the game in a lower screen resolution than your native screen Resolution i know that sucks but you will get higher FPS.

Here are some graphic setting to play around with.

The biggest FPS consumer is Shadows....
Allso install on a SSD drive to help with loading of textures and new areas not necessary but will help.

Model quality: Although dropping this from High to Low only nudged performance up to 106fps, a 4% increase, this is actually one of the more impactful settings to change. It also doesn’t make models look that much worse, so it’s fine to reduce.

Detail distance: This can probably stay on High, as changing to Low only gave me an extra 1fps.

Instance distance: As above, there was just one additional frame per second to be gained from the Low setting, so keep this high.

Texture quality: I’m also not convinced that this needs lowering. Medium isn’t significantly faster, at 104fps, and Low just hurts fidelity too much.

Texture filtering: I’d suggest turning this right down to Trilinear mode. It gives a relatively spirited boost, up to 107fps on my RTX 3070, and the visual quality difference is minimal.

Animation level of detail: Stick to High. Low gave me a mere 1fps improvement, so isn’t worth the cut.

Slow HDD mode: This might help with slow-loading textures when enabled, but won’t visibly affect performance at all when Baldur’s Gate 3 is installed on an SSD.

Dynamic crowds: Switching this off is arguably unnecessary. Losing the extra detail didn’t change my average performance by a single frame, and large crowds are rare anyway.

Shadow quality: You can set this to Low for a modest yet tempting speed boost; up to 108fps in my case, and without seriously damaging how shadows look. There is one tradeoff, a weird raked effect on certain ground textures, but it’s not too frequent or bothersome.

Cloud quality: Leave this on High, I say. Low doesn’t seem to affect average performance either way.

Fog quality: This, on the other hand, can be reduced for a little framerate nudge. Low quality got me 107fps, a 5% rise.

Nvidia DLSS: The big gun. While DLSS is best deployed at 1440p or higher – 1080p with upscaling will always look slightly fuzzier – it’s highly potent in Baldur’s Gate 3, turning that 102fps average into 130fps on the sharpest Quality setting. If you’ve got both a GeForce RTX card and a high-res gaming monitor, it’s ideal.

AMD FSR 1.0: Other graphics cards still have an upscaling option, though again, I wish it was a newer version of FSR. This 1.0 iteration could get my test PC up to 128fps on Ultra Quality mode, but it looks nowhere near as crisp and clean as Quality DLSS. Maybe only consider it if you’re playing at 4K, or are really struggling with 1440p.

FidelityFX Sharpening: AMD’s sharpening filter doesn’t really help or hurt performance, though if you’re going to use it, I’d suggest leaving the sharpness slider no higher than about 25%. Any higher and it starts to look overly digital and processed.

Anti-aliasing: If you’re not using DLSS, which overrides this setting with its own anti-aliasing, stick to the default TAA. SMAA might prevent that texture flickering mentioned above, but otherwise doesn’t smooth edges as effectively – the entire point of AA. It performs identically, in any case. There’s also a DLAA setting, which is basically DLSS’ AA component without the upscaling. It does look a tad sharper than TAA, though is slower as well, dropping my test PC’s performance to 96fps.

Ambient occlusion: Ditch it. Sometimes, disabling ambient occlusion will rob a game of half its shadow detail, leaving everything looking flat and fake. Here, though, the visual loss is hard to spot, and jettisoning AO’s rendering needs got my PC up to 108fps.

Depth of field: You can turn this off, if you don’t like the blur effect that appears when chatting to party members, but know that it won’t affect performance if you do. Same for merely switching from the default Circular blur effect to the alternative option, Gaussian.

Depth of field quality: There’s no need to change this from the highest setting, Quarter Denoise, down to just Quarter. It’s no faster, and why would you not want de-noising?

God rays: Strangely, turning these off – they’re on with the Ultra preset – actually cut performance down to 99fps. Presumably because doing so angers God? Just leave them on.

Bloom: No oddities here, just a simple post-process effect that can be disabled or re-enabled with no impact on framerate.

Subsurface scattering: I only got a single bonus frame per second from turning this off. Leave it enabled, then, for better-looking soft textures.

Evidently, there are no individual settings (outside of DLSS and FSR) that can magically send framerates skyrocketing by themselves. By combining a few choice changes, though, it’s still possible to give Baldur’s Gate 3 a respectable jolt.

Here’s what I’d call its best settings to use:

Launcher option: DirectX 11
Model quality: Low
Texture filtering: Trilinear
Shadow quality: Low
Fog quality: Low
Ambient occlusion: Off
Everything else: Ultra preset equivalents or in your case low maybe medium.

Link to original author
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-system-requirements-pc-performance-and-best-settings-to-use

[juliejayne]

Thanks, that was reallly helpful.

[pascal.difolco]

Originally posted by SwordAtSea:

Hey, so I downloaded this game and love it so much, I don't think I've ever had this much fun playing a fantasy game. But the game really does struggle and crashes constantly and is very slow to load. I lowered all the graphics I could to low. but little help. I've played over 30 hours and I don't know if the game is getting more intensive but it appears to be getting slower/crashing more/getting more frustrating playing this game.

Now I'm trying to check if my PC meets the system requirements and I'm not sure if it does.

I currently have:

AMD Ryzen 5 3550H with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx,
8gb Ram,
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Minimum system requirements on steam:
Intel Core i5 4690/ AMD FX 8350
RAM: 8 GB
Graphics card: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)

Now I'm not a computing expert, I did some research when I purchased this laptop in late 2019 and it seemed to be a good mid CPU for what I wanted to do. But what is FX 8350, that doens't seem to be produced anymore. But then what is the equivalent? Do I meet the system requirements or not? I've ran two different website's, and one said I do meet the minimum requirements and one said I didn't.

If I do meet the minimum requirements, how can I improve the performance of this game?

I'm just asking for advice. I know this is a weird forum, but I don't know anyone IRL to help me and I'm struggling to understand what is the order of Ryzen CPUs to even understand what i have in comparison to the system requirements and the new Ryzen CPUs listed on sites like Argos and Amazon.

Everything in your laptop is rather weak, but I think the worst is the lack of RAM, if you can add some more to get 16GB or even 12GB I suspect everything will be smoother
And do yu have a SSD or ol'spinin' HDD ?
Anyway you can't upgrade anything else on a laptop...

[SwordAtSea]

Originally posted by nurby:

You should be fine
Just dont expect to run on high settings. If you are struggling with low settings allready then maybe its time to upgrade in the future.

But just hang on in there in patch 2 Larian is fixing performance issues so that could improve situation.

Allso run the game in a lower screen resolution than your native screen Resolution i know that sucks but you will get higher FPS.

Here are some graphic setting to play around with.

The biggest FPS consumer is Shadows....
Allso install on a SSD drive to help with loading of textures and new areas not necessary but will help.

Model quality: Although dropping this from High to Low only nudged performance up to 106fps, a 4% increase, this is actually one of the more impactful settings to change. It also doesn’t make models look that much worse, so it’s fine to reduce.

Detail distance: This can probably stay on High, as changing to Low only gave me an extra 1fps.

Instance distance: As above, there was just one additional frame per second to be gained from the Low setting, so keep this high.

Texture quality: I’m also not convinced that this needs lowering. Medium isn’t significantly faster, at 104fps, and Low just hurts fidelity too much.

Texture filtering: I’d suggest turning this right down to Trilinear mode. It gives a relatively spirited boost, up to 107fps on my RTX 3070, and the visual quality difference is minimal.

Animation level of detail: Stick to High. Low gave me a mere 1fps improvement, so isn’t worth the cut.

Slow HDD mode: This might help with slow-loading textures when enabled, but won’t visibly affect performance at all when Baldur’s Gate 3 is installed on an SSD.

Dynamic crowds: Switching this off is arguably unnecessary. Losing the extra detail didn’t change my average performance by a single frame, and large crowds are rare anyway.

Shadow quality: You can set this to Low for a modest yet tempting speed boost; up to 108fps in my case, and without seriously damaging how shadows look. There is one tradeoff, a weird raked effect on certain ground textures, but it’s not too frequent or bothersome.

Cloud quality: Leave this on High, I say. Low doesn’t seem to affect average performance either way.

Fog quality: This, on the other hand, can be reduced for a little framerate nudge. Low quality got me 107fps, a 5% rise.

Nvidia DLSS: The big gun. While DLSS is best deployed at 1440p or higher – 1080p with upscaling will always look slightly fuzzier – it’s highly potent in Baldur’s Gate 3, turning that 102fps average into 130fps on the sharpest Quality setting. If you’ve got both a GeForce RTX card and a high-res gaming monitor, it’s ideal.

AMD FSR 1.0: Other graphics cards still have an upscaling option, though again, I wish it was a newer version of FSR. This 1.0 iteration could get my test PC up to 128fps on Ultra Quality mode, but it looks nowhere near as crisp and clean as Quality DLSS. Maybe only consider it if you’re playing at 4K, or are really struggling with 1440p.

FidelityFX Sharpening: AMD’s sharpening filter doesn’t really help or hurt performance, though if you’re going to use it, I’d suggest leaving the sharpness slider no higher than about 25%. Any higher and it starts to look overly digital and processed.

Anti-aliasing: If you’re not using DLSS, which overrides this setting with its own anti-aliasing, stick to the default TAA. SMAA might prevent that texture flickering mentioned above, but otherwise doesn’t smooth edges as effectively – the entire point of AA. It performs identically, in any case. There’s also a DLAA setting, which is basically DLSS’ AA component without the upscaling. It does look a tad sharper than TAA, though is slower as well, dropping my test PC’s performance to 96fps.

Ambient occlusion: Ditch it. Sometimes, disabling ambient occlusion will rob a game of half its shadow detail, leaving everything looking flat and fake. Here, though, the visual loss is hard to spot, and jettisoning AO’s rendering needs got my PC up to 108fps.

Depth of field: You can turn this off, if you don’t like the blur effect that appears when chatting to party members, but know that it won’t affect performance if you do. Same for merely switching from the default Circular blur effect to the alternative option, Gaussian.

Depth of field quality: There’s no need to change this from the highest setting, Quarter Denoise, down to just Quarter. It’s no faster, and why would you not want de-noising?

God rays: Strangely, turning these off – they’re on with the Ultra preset – actually cut performance down to 99fps. Presumably because doing so angers God? Just leave them on.

Bloom: No oddities here, just a simple post-process effect that can be disabled or re-enabled with no impact on framerate.

Subsurface scattering: I only got a single bonus frame per second from turning this off. Leave it enabled, then, for better-looking soft textures.

Evidently, there are no individual settings (outside of DLSS and FSR) that can magically send framerates skyrocketing by themselves. By combining a few choice changes, though, it’s still possible to give Baldur’s Gate 3 a respectable jolt.

Here’s what I’d call its best settings to use:

Launcher option: DirectX 11
Model quality: Low
Texture filtering: Trilinear
Shadow quality: Low
Fog quality: Low
Ambient occlusion: Off
Everything else: Ultra preset equivalents or in your case low maybe medium.

Link to original author
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-system-requirements-pc-performance-and-best-settings-to-use

Hey, I just want to say this was so helfpul-- I'd done most of this apart drop the resolution, which helped massively, so i've increased the other settings to mid or high. Since patch 2 I've increased resolution to the mid one and haven't had any issues, so I'm pretty happy.

[juliejayne]

This is really helpful, but I just came across another consideration. If you have a crash, and the game verifies your files... yada yada... It may also reset ALL of your options.

So check before going back to your adventures.