Baldur’s Gate 3 City Performance Test by DF Shows Bad Frame ‘Health’ in Act 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 has received lavish and well-deserved praise for its outstanding quality, near-universal critical acclaim (with the game sitting on top of Metacritic and OpenCritic’s all-time PC charts), and incredible commercial success for a cRPG with record-breaking concurrency numbers on Steam (not to mention wild engagement figures of over five daily hours of playtime on average).

However, that doesn’t mean the game is perfect. No game is, and for Baldur’s Gate 3, the main issues are of a technical nature, between some potentially game-breaking bugs and the rather disappointing performance in Act 3. The game’s first and second acts aren’t problematic for most configurations since the player’s party is generally adventuring away in sparsely populated areas if not in the wilds proper.

During my playthrough of the first and second acts, I could easily switch to NVIDIA DLAA to maximize image fidelity on my AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4090, 32GB DDR5 PC while retaining 4K resolution and maxed graphics settings. That changes in the third act when you enter the titular city.

The amount of NPCs in Baldur’s Gate is much greater, and the game’s performance suffers greatly. Even switching to DLSS on the Performance Mode doesn’t help much, likely due to the CPU-bound limitations that DLSS Super Resolution cannot address – the absence of DLSS Frame Generation is unfortunate here.

Digital Foundry confirmed my guess in a test video that just went live. After accessing a reader’s save, Alexander Battaglia tested the third act of Baldur’s Gate 3 and came away with similar conclusions.

When sitting still the frame rate is around 90 FPS when CPU limited under DX11 on a Core i9 12900k which is of course a monster CPU. When I start moving the character around in many circles, due to the movement, the game starts to run 20 percent worse on average even though the view and the amount of objects on screen is essentially the exact same. Movement appears to be causing frame times in fps spikes in a bad way that is pretty poor honestly. 

Another issue found in the third Act is in camera transitions from cutscenes or conversations, which will have much larger frame time stutters in it and massive drops when the camera changes angles to enter a conversation.

But the biggest difference in the third Act is found in frame health, as I like to call it. When the frame time line is jittery and stuttery, I call that bad frame health. When it’s smoother and more regular, I would say the game has good frame health. The third Act of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the city tends to show bad frame health due to a greater variance in frame times. Compounding on this are the earthquakes you can see in the city which coincide with large spikes in the frame time which look like bigger stutters on screen visually.

DF’s Battaglia also notes that the aforementioned case can get much worse when running on mid-range PCs. AMD Zen 2’s Ryzen 5 3600 CPU was said to run this third Act particularly badly, even more so if you happen to be playing a Necromancer type of character since the summoned undead minions increase the frame time variance even further.

Sadly, there isn’t much that can be done from the player’s end to mitigate the performance issues shown in Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3. Even capping the frame rate to 30FPS doesn’t help in a significant way. The only thing that can help is improved optimization from Larian, not to mention better CPU scaling when more cores and threads are available. As mentioned earlier, implementing DLSS 3 could also be a significant boon. Let’s hope PureDark can look into a mod when he’s done with Starfield.