Baldur's Gate 3: Quicksave is my favourite spell

[Darryk]

Those arrows of Astarion aren't to be underestimated.

[Corvinus85]

Well within Act II now. Such a tonal difference from Act I. While the game had an obvious creepy factor from the start, Act I still mostly feels like a standard fantasy adventure, while Act II is more like the D&D version of Resident Evil. I wonder how Act III will be. Still baffles me that this game heavily advertised the details of the city of Baldur's Gate and I'm about 50 hrs into my game and still haven't gotten there yet. What a game!

That being said, have they fixed the performance problems in Act III? I noticed a few small issues in Act II which Act I didn't have, like a few short freezes during dialogue scenes.

[Heartofice]

I have only just made it to Act III and I think it has slowed me down and I lost my enthusiasm a bit. The nature of the story means it feels like I need to start all over again with exploring and ramping the narrative up and I got a bit drained by it all. 

I felt similarly with Act II I think, it's like starting a new game all over.

[Luzifer's right hand]

14 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Well within Act II now. Such a tonal difference from Act I. While the game had an obvious creepy factor from the start, Act I still mostly feels like a standard fantasy adventure, while Act II is more like the D&D version of Resident Evil. I wonder how Act III will be. Still baffles me that this game heavily advertised the details of the city of Baldur's Gate and I'm about 50 hrs into my game and still haven't gotten there yet. What a game!

That being said, have they fixed the performance problems in Act III? I noticed a few small issues in Act II which Act I didn't have, like a few short freezes during dialogue scenes.

There has been an official statement from Larian regarding the fact that the ACT III problems got worse again after some improvement.

 

Quote

 

In Patch 4 we introduced a fix that would prevent the Scrying Eyes in Moonrise Towers from immediately calling the guards on you when stealing, even if you were sneaking, or invisible for example.

This fix had the unintended consequence of causing unnoticed thefts & acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended. Essentially, your ‘DM’ - in a real-world sense - constantly thinks about the acts of theft & violence the player keeps doing, without ever moving on or verbalising them. Mulling on it ad infinitum.

These unnoticed and eternally-active acts of theft & violence eventually bogged down the game. The more a player commits those acts, the more the game is trying to keep that all up to date and in memory, and so the more slowdowns start happening. Essentially, the ‘DM’ eventually becomes unable to operate. By Act 3 this caused slow-down issues, which after some sleuthing we’re extremely happy to say we’ve solved in Patch 5, which is in testing and scheduled to release this week.

So if you are a standard RPG gamer that grabs a lot of red marked stuff it sounds like you are fucked until the patch.

Performance during my current playtrough is definitely worse.

Edited November 28, 2023 by Luzifer's right hand

[Corvinus85]

8 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

There has been an official statement from Larian regarding the fact that the ACT III problems got worse again after some improvement.

 

So if you are a standard RPG gamer that grabs a lot of red marked stuff it sounds like you are fucked until the patch.

Performance during my current playtrough is definitely worse.

I don't usually steal a lot of items, but sometimes the game itself is weird about it. For example, I defeated Raphael's devil nemesis in the Gauntlet of Shar and proceeded to loot the place. There was a chest marked red in an adjacent chamber, but I don't know why it was considered theft since all the hostiles had been removed.

That being said the most egregious theft so far has been getting into Ketheric Thorm's quarters through Balthazar's quarters, killing his guard dog (because I couldn't pass the checks) and then pilfering the place. I even took the dog's body because I thought maybe that would trigger an alarm. Then I forgot I took its body and dumped it outside the Nightsong pool.  

The Larian statement above really was on my mind when I fought Balthazar by the Nightsong and Astarion got kicked off the ledge. I thought for sure I would have to restart, but luckily you can still revive characters that die that way. 

So it this why the map in the corner has been having a red contour for a while now for me?

Edited November 28, 2023 by Corvinus85

[Ser Lany]

Started a Dark Urge playthrough. Don't like it much. I really don't play evil well at all. Only did it because my rotten brat of a son told me it was "edgy, not evil" 

Spoiler

I've done my best to play it neutral. I've let a lot of people die, including letting Wyll kill Karlach, by simply not saying anything. 

Thought this would be a good time to try and romance Astarion since he approves of not helping people. Not working, no matter how much I let him feed on me.  We even visited the Drow Twins together, had a lovely time but he lied and said I was the one denying him my bed.  I thought that after that ice breaker, we'd be lovers, but no dice still.  It's early days in Act III still, so I guess there's time.

I think, I hope, I have my sleep murdering under control now. Nearly killed Wyll after our dance, but reset and managed to wake him, he tied me up and we got through that night.  I think I have told everyone in camp now about being a Bhaalspawn. They are taking it well, for the most part. Gale flipped out at one point, but the next time we talked he was fine.

 

Sometimes I feel bored and sometimes I feel like I should go back and finish every single playthrough I started  Some of the early ones were really bad when I had no Idea what I was doing, like failing to save the Teiflings and the Grove getting sealed off, Halsin being dead when I found him, not saving people my kids told me it was important to save. They would defiantly make for some interesting endings.  

[Poobah]

Personally my favourite flavour / rp for Dark Urge is "trying desperately to be good" but of course sometimes those evil urges within take over when the dice go another way.

[Werthead]

Patch 5 is pretty colossal. Might give it a whirl this weekend and finally finish the damn game.

That said, getting constant cuts to black whilst gaming. It's very bad on Starfield, intermittent and tolerable on Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II, and barely a thing on Baldur's Gate III. But concerning. Though it was a bad DisplayPort cable but after using 4 of them and the problem keeps recurring, apparently not. Consulting with my PC builder in case it's a problem with the 4090 or the PSU.

Meanwhile: 

 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Patch 5 is pretty colossal. Might give it a whirl this weekend and finally finish the damn game.

That said, getting constant cuts to black whilst gaming. It's very bad on Starfield, intermittent and tolerable on Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II, and barely a thing on Baldur's Gate III. But concerning. Though it was a bad DisplayPort cable but after using 4 of them and the problem keeps recurring, apparently not. Consulting with my PC builder in case it's a problem with the 4090 or the PSU.

Meanwhile: 

 

Could be an internal monitor issue as well. If it’s only going to black without actually switching off,then it’s not a PSU problem

Edited December 1, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Kalbear]

29 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Could be an internal monitor issue as well. If it’s only going to black without actually switching off,then it’s not a PSU problem

Depends a lot on what PSU issue it is. If it's going hot or the connector is getting fried then it could easily be a PSU issue for that specific connection. Which for 4090s has apparently been not awesome. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

On a side note why buy a 4090 at all? You’ll be CPU bottlenecked anyways in 5 years, same if you’d gone with a 4070 or 80, so you’ll have to switch out your card regardless. The gain beyond 5 years would be down to a few frames at most(atleast for the latest AAA)  over lesser 40 series cards. 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

On a side note why buy a 4090 at all? You’ll be CPU bottlenecked anyways in 5 years, same if you’d gone with a 4070 or 80, so you’ll have to switch out your card regardless. The gain beyond 5 years would be down to a few frames at most(atleast for the latest AAA)  over lesser 40 series cards. 

Because right now it's fucking awesome

[Werthead]

Yup. Running BG3 or Alan Wake II or whatever at 4K at 144fps is bananas.

Although that does make it run starting-to-get-iffy hot so I keep everything at 60fps. And it still looks insane. Alan Wake II has bits which go almost 100% photorealistic which mildly freaked me out (at least until any human characters appear, games aren't there yet).

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup. Running BG3 or Alan Wake II or whatever at 4K at 144fps is bananas.

Although that does make it run starting-to-get-iffy hot so I keep everything at 60fps. And it still looks insane. Alan Wake II has bits which go almost 100% photorealistic which mildly freaked me out (at least until any human characters appear, games aren't there yet).

Honest question , do you actually see a difference between 4K and 1440p on a 27-32 inch monitor ? Is 4K gaming on PC worth it ?

im asking because I’ve heard when you’re just a certain fixed distance away from the pc then it dosent matter whether it’s 4K or 2k…

yes I’m aware the video is 5 years old and the pricing of 4K panels and graphic card power has vastly increased. The argument for whether it makes a visual difference on a 27inch monitor from which you’re sitting extremely close,still stands…

Edited December 2, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Honest question , do you actually see a difference between 4K and 1440p on a 27-32 inch monitor ? Is 4K gaming on PC worth it ?

Holy crap, yes. Absolutely. 

Now, if you can choose between running 2k with all the features on and 4k at playable settings? That's tougher. But 4k is a pretty big difference and it's pretty noticeable if you have a rig that can support it.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Got it,  my 3080 isn’t capable of 4K with maxed out graphics, gonna stick with 2k till the next upgrade cycle at the very least. Hopefully 4K won’t cost a small fortune in 5 years on PC.Even with 2k I’m only getting around 40 fps on graphically demanding games like cyberpunk with maxed out settings…

Edited December 2, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Poobah]

Outside of sacrificing your firstborn to the corporate glory of Nvidia you will be choosing between triple and double digit FPS when it comes to 4k Vs 2k for a while yet as well if you're playing modern graphically demanding games, and even on Nvidia cards adding RT in on top gonna be a noticeable hit based on the benchmarks I've seen. 

I do wonder if GPU tech has mostly plateaued for the time being - by and large more performance is being brute forces with ever more power but this is resulting in increasingly hot and power hungry GPUs that need ever larger and louder cooling solutions (if I were rich enough to be dropping £2k on a graphics card I'd probably just go ahead and spend an extra bunch of money having a custom loop liquid cooling setup rather than listen to the fans on the 4090). It seems that upscaling technology is increasingly being pushed as the way forward. I believe Xbox uses AMD technology and thus some kinda FSR 2/3 implementation Kal? 

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup. Running BG3 <snip> 4K at 144fps is bananas.

Worth noting that on BG3 at least there's a CPU bottleneck rather than GPU one (whereas with Alan Wake which you also mentioned it's GPU intensive). With your 4090 you should be able to achieve significantly over 144fps 4k with any of AMDs X3D CPUs including the last generation's 5800X3D which I have to feel must be scaring Intel's engineers with its far superior gaming performance to their offerings. Something like a 13900k will also do it though if you're stuck on an Intel platform. 

[Werthead]

7 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Honest question , do you actually see a difference between 4K and 1440p on a 27-32 inch monitor ? Is 4K gaming on PC worth it ?

im asking because I’ve heard when you’re just a certain fixed distance away from the pc then it dosent matter whether it’s 4K or 2k…

I skipped 1440p and upgraded from 1080p to 4K, so in that case yes, the difference is absolutely worth it. And the reason I never went to 1440p is that I couldn't see a single difference from 1080p at all at close range. But 4K the difference is significantly noticeable.

[Ran]

Just dittoing on 4k. I first played CP2077 at 1080p, and it looked great... But 4k just made a lot more of the detail pop. I'm sure the psycho ray tracing and ray reconstruction added later on helped that too, but still, it does look noticeably better. For the first day or two at ,4k, I kept stopping to look at stuff like how detailed some of the clothing textures were, because they stood out.

It's not cheap, though, as others have said.

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Just dittoing on 4k. I first played CP2077 at 1080p, and it looked great... But 4k just made a lot more of the detail pop. I'm sure the psycho ray tracing and ray reconstruction added later on helped that too, but still, it does look noticeably better. For the first day or two at ,4k, I kept stopping to look at stuff like how detailed some of the clothing textures were, because they stood out.

It's not cheap, though, as others have said.

What virtue/benefit is there in 4K resolutions versus just having higher resolution textures? 

Edited December 2, 2023 by IlyaP