Baldur’s Gate 3 is an expansive and detailed game with its beautiful landscape design and compelling story. It makes for a remarkable experience. Therefore, for PC players, having the best settings in Baldur’s Gate 3 is a must.
However, FPS drops and stutters can sometimes hinder this experience. There can be a lot of reasons for this, like an outdated graphics card driver or a low-end PC. However, you can tweak the in-game settings to get better performance on the PC in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Best PC settings for Baldur’s Gate 3
At Segmentnext, we checked Baldur’s Gate 3 on multiple PC setups and have concluded the following are the best settings if you are aiming for a stable 60fps with all graphical bells and whistles.
Before proceeding any further, remember that these are for mid to high-end PCs. 1440p is the target resolution here with a Vsynced 60fps.
- API: DirectX 11
- Model Quality: High
- Detail Distance: High
- Instance Distance: High
- Texture Quality: High (ultra if you are rocking a state-of-the-art rig)
- Texture Filtering: Anisotropic x16
- Animation Level of Detail: High
- Slow HDD Mode: Off
- Dynamic Crowds: On
- Shadow Quality: High
- Cloud Quality: High
- Fog Quality: Medium
- DLSS: Balanced (if you are using Nvidia GPU)
- AMD FSR: Balanced (if you are using AMD GPU)
- FidelityFX Sharpening: Off
- Sharpness: Default
- CAS: On
- Anti-Aliasing: None (if using DLSS)/ DLAA for native picture
- Ambient Occlusion: On
- Depth of Field: Personal Choice (we decided to keep it off)
- God Rays: On
- Bloom: Off
- Subsurface Scattering: On
Best Baldur’s Gate 3 settings for Low-End PCs
While our settings above worked flawlessly for our high-end rig (12600k, 3080ti, 32 GB memory), what about the low-end PC? This is where you will need to tweak the settings a bit more, as the ones recommended above can and will result in a slideshow in certain areas.
The settings below target vsynced 60fps with 1080p resolution.
- API: DirectX 11
- Model Quality: High
- Detail Distance: Medium
- Instance Distance: Medium
- Texture Quality: Medium
- Texture Filtering: Anisotropic x16
- Animation Level of Detail: High
- Slow HDD Mode: Off
- Dynamic Crowds: Off
- Shadow Quality: Medium
- Cloud Quality: Medium
- Fog Quality: Medium
- DLSS: Performance (if you are using Nvidia GPU)
- AMD FSR: Balanced (If you are using AMD GPU)
- FidelityFX Sharpening: Off
- Sharpness: Default
- CAS: On
- Anti-Aliasing: None (if using DLSS)/ DLAA for native picture
- Ambient Occlusion: On
- Depth of Field: Personal Choice (we decided to keep it off)
- God Rays: On
- Bloom: Off
- Subsurface Scattering: Off
You can get a lot of performance from FSR if you are an AMD user. Larian silently added FSR 2.2 support to Baldur’s Gate 3 with patch 4. However, the picture quality is still somewhat underwhelming when compared to DLSS.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Configuration File tweaks to improve performance
The configuration file for Baldur’s Gate 3 is located inside C:\User\Username\Appdata\Local\Larian Studios\Baldur’s Gate 3\. You can tweak it to create custom resolutions or turn off the settings, but we recommend against it. Larian has done a marvelous job of adding all the tweaks in the GUI menu, so tinkering with the config file is not recommended.
Tips to improve Baldur’s Gate 3 performance
With patches 4 and 5, Larian has improved the performance of Act 3 by a huge margin. Overall, Baldur’s Gate 3 now runs smoothly and has fewer problems than ever before. However, if you are running into performance issues still, make sure that you follow our tips to iron out the remaining issues.
1. Update your Graphics Card drivers
This is the first thing you need to do when starting a new game or whenever there is a new driver available. Use DDU (display driver uninstaller) to do a clean fresh instead of overwriting the old drivers. This fixes most of the performance issues and random crashes.
2. Stick with Upscalers
Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 2.2 do a marvelous job of improving the frame rates while maintaining the almost-native picture quality. At this point, the native resolution is a waste of your PC resources when the same results can be achieved with upscalers with much improved FPS.
3. Skip the Larian launcher
This doesn’t affect your game adversely in any way. You will still get all your Steam achievements. The only downside will be the inability to select Graphics API on launch (which you can remedy by going to the install folder and running the exe with the intended API).
To disable Larian Launcher, all you need to do is follow three steps precisely. This will remove the overhead, and you will get a much smoother in-game experience.
- Go to Steam, find Baldur’s Gate 3, and right-click on it.
- Select the Properties and then select General.
- Type the following command into Launch options without quotes: “-skip-launcher.”
4. Vsync is your best friend
We love playing games with unlocked frame rates on our VRR displays, but this is not the case here. Baldur’s Gate 3 exhibits strange stuttering and lag with unlocked frame rates. We recommend that you keep the triple-buffer vsync option to remove frame pacing issues.
5. Remove the Dynamic Crowd
The crowd in the Lower City can wreak havoc on the systems with a low-end CPU. No matter how good your GPU is, the frame rates are going to tank in Act 3 if you are not using a bank-breaking CPU. Make sure that you turn off the dynamic crowd to give your PC some breathing room and get a much better experience as a result.
Should you choose Vulkan or DirectX?
Larian Studio itself recommends DX11 graphics API over Vulkan at the time of writing this article. You can choose your preferred API when launching the game with Larian’s Launcher or running the exe with the API name directly from the install folder.
While Vulkan is a superior API in 99% of the cases, it all boils down to the implementation. It introduces strange artifacts in Baldur’s Gate 3 and tanks the performance in certain areas. We have checked both APIs thoroughly, and they have similar performance in most cases. Due to the aforementioned issue, we think DX11 is the obvious choice here.
