Baldurs gate all of a sudden start lagging

[Gnurk]

Hi

First of all i need to say i have rebooted the computer, i have BG3 on an SSD disk.
I have a laptop with nvidia geforce rtx 3060. And i have made sure that is the selected video card in options.

BG3 have been running smoothly for weeks. But all of a sudden it lags, allready from the game menu.
The graphics driver is up-to-date.

I have verified game files.


I dont know what to do to fix the game, there seems to be no obvious reason why it lags, i am not running any mods, and have never even installed any mods.

Any suggestions? Please.

[Gnurk]

I'll also add i tried googling and suggestions such as:
"Disabling launcher"
"Resetting settings"
"Double buffering instead of triple"

Has not helped :(
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I would prefer not having to reinstall, but maybe that is only option?

[Gnurk]

Update: i did a reinstall and it didnt help

I think it might have something to do with the update 10.04.2024.

[juliejayne]

Have you tried cleaning cache files and folders. And whereabouts in the game are you.

[Gnurk]

Originally posted by juliejayne:

Have you tried cleaning cache files and folders. And whereabouts in the game are you.

Thank you for your suggestion
I must admit i am a bit unsure excactly where to find them? (what folders excactly?)

I am at the end of chapter1.
Just about to go to underdark.

[juliejayne]

OK, the following guides should help. But I would also check the cooling of your laptop. A 3060 can get pretty warm for a laptop, and to protect itself the PC will then throttle the CPU. Because BG3 is a large game, it needs a decent size of free space on the SSD, and a decent amount of RAM. I don't know if you have another storage drive, or if you can delete some of the older savefiles that you might have. All good options.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3025093305
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3016159305
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3018203217

[Gnurk]

Thank you for your very thorough reply.

I did everything according to the cleaning cache guide but no help.

My computer tends to get very warm that is true, but the lagging issue didn't happend before even when computer was hot as heck.
Now it happends even if computer has been of all night, from the very start.

I double checked and my SSD currently has 112 free GB space.
However i see that i am saving to steam cloud, and there i am using 800/1000 could that be somehow be causing the issue?
(It seems to be a frame issue, so it would be strange but i am not so knowledgeable in these things)

I only have this one storage device but i will now try to delete all the old autosaves to see if it helps. :)
I will update after.

I would again thank you for taking the time to help me! Much appreciated :)

[Gnurk]

Ok so i went through save files in-game and deleted all save files except 2 (one for each campaign i have)
But the frame rate is still awful compared to earlier.

I would add that the game is not unplayable like this, but much less enjoyable.

I also tried setting overall quality down from "ultra" which i was running smoothly before with no problems at all now to "low" and i also put on Nvidia DLSS

That made things much smoother, but the graphics are of course much worse, and i will say even though things are smoother it did run smoother on ultra before the patch....

[juliejayne]

I would certainly only use the Steam Cloud if you are actually playing from several different computers.

The Graphics settings often do not have as much effect as people expect. Problems are more often caused by a CPU bottleneck, or lack of RAM.
How much RAM space do you have? And is it DDR4 or 5.

[Gnurk]

Hi

I have 16gb ram, i tried to manually select memory range in windows according to the first of the 3 links you sent.
should be DDR4

laptop is: Acer Nitro 5 AN515-57 15,6" FHD 144 Hz

[juliejayne]

16GB Ram is a little on the low side, especially if you are running graphics at higher settings.

The cpu is a Intel Core i7-11800H processor, so should be OK. The SSD is 512GB which is a bit small if it is your only storage, and if you only have 112 free, then you are going to start running into issues.
The GPU has only 4 GB of Vram, again OK, but generally not enough.

It feels to me, and I could be wrong, and no disrespect to Acer, but it feels as if that laptop was built down to a price. Normally that would be fine, but once you start pushing it with Ultra graphics on a big game that needs lots of fast RAM and SSD space, it begins to struggle. And to get hotter,

Sorry that I can't be any more positive.

[Gnurk]

That is allright, but isn't it strange that it ran fine for the first 20 hours (i restarted quite a bit)
Then all of a sudden lags?

I wont take any offense or anything, i am just looking to solve the issue.
That is if it is at all possible.

[juliejayne]

Well not really.

If you restarted a lot. Was that simple game restarts or more dramatic re-installs?
Also have you ensured that there is nothing else running in the background. AV apps, windows updates etc can all run as background apps, and screw with your game.

I was a 100+ hours in before hitting any serious issues, but on much weaker hardware, but not a laptop. I thought it was a GPU issue, but it turned out to be more likely to be CPU. So I bought a new (2nd hand) PC. Still not installed yet. As following those guides, clearing the caches files and directories and giving my system more Virtual RAM to work with, has kept me going. So far.

But it is a constant battle to keep the PC tuned well enough.

[Gnurk]

Thank you for your tips anyways :)

I will add that today i started the game, and it had reset graphics to ultra and all of a sudden its smooth again.

[Gnurk]

last patch fixed the issue all of itself :)

[juliejayne]

The last hotfix was on the 11th.

More likely that something that you or your PC did, fixed the issue, with your PC.