Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the most highly acclaimed games of the year, marrying the best of video games with the comple…
Happily, PlayStation 5 manages to deliver a creditable rendition of the game, but the now legendary Act Three continues to humble CPU performance - perhaps more than we anticipated going in.
You probably haven't gotten to Act 3 yet, the game is extremely CPU bound. I have a Ryzen 9 7950X and while Act 1 and 2 were basically locked to 144fps the entire time, in Act 3 I have seen dips down to the 40s.
Try turning off "Dynamic Crowds" in settings. I didn't notice much difference in how the crowds behaved, but it supposedly simplifies their AI and pathfinding to cut down on CPU use. It helped me a lot in the city.
2060 super user here. I'm assuming you haven't made it to Act 3? The game has some performance issues there. I happily turned down the graphics to continue playing smoothly but was a tad disappointed.
I'm on my second playthrough though and they have patched it since my first experience so hopefully the evil campaign runs (visually) smoother.
Act 3's issues aren't GPU bound, it's entirely CPU bottlenecked. It's likely someone with a slower GPU won't see as big a drop in performance in act 3 as you, and it's likely you don't see any performance gain from using DLSS in act 3. My 2080 Super was sleeping through it even at 3440x1440 on ultra while my Ryzen 7 3700x was getting thrashed.
More info from the article: quality mode is 1440p 30fps, and performance mode is 960p (upscaled to 1440p using FSR2) 60fps. Although late-game, specifically the big cities in act 3, can dip into mid-20fps range
I don't get all the performance complaints about Act 3. The worst lag I ever had in the entire game was the first time I walked into the druid grove, dropped to 1-5fps for like 20 seconds and then it was more or less fine the rest of the game. One crash in 160 hours of playing, and I'm still on patch 0.2 atm.
That is the full release only. It's also less than accurate to say 5 hours a day everyday, it was more like 10-15 hours a day with some days where I didn't play at all.
Yeah, it runs very nicely on ultra on a variety of hardware. It's been optimized and has even improved since release.
I am hoping they improved the controller interface, though. I use that even though I play the PC version, and it was somewhat broken as of a couple weeks ago.
PS5 gamers are more likely to put down $70 for a new game than PS4 players are to put down $60 on a new game. It's probably just not a worthwhile investment.
Consoles are expensive. Cutting off support to older equipment is rough. Keeping your entertainment "current" is a big ask for a lot of people who are already struggling. As long as people are using the old stuff, devs should do what they can inside the technical limits to extend their lifespan.