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
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