Conclusion

Baldur's Gate 3 is an RPG masterpiece that will give you hundreds of hours of interesting gameplay. Larian Studios has had huge success with Divinity Original Sin II—I loved that game. When I heard that they are making Baldur's Gate 3 I had high hopes and I'm pleased with the outcome. The story is complex, intricate and interesting. In your journeys you come across many unique characters, lovable, troubled, tragic. The writing is top-notch and there's just so much to explore. The game follows the D&D 5e rules, which are much more accessible, especially to new players. While I still think there's too much focus on environmental effects and throwables, if you've played a Larian game before, you'll know how things work. For everyone else, there's several difficulty levels, which can be changed at any time, making learning the game mechanics much more enjoyable. Right now the game is sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive with over 40,000 recent reviews on Steam. If you like RPGs, and the turn-based combat mechanics are something you can live with, do check out Baldur's Gate 3.

Graphics are excellent for a top-down isometric RPG as our screenshots confirm. There's lots of detail in the environments and the maps have been crafted carefully with lots of love. There is now an added focus on vertical movement, so you have multi-storey buildings, caves with many levels and much more. I really like how well lighting works in Baldur's Gate 3. Navigating your way through dark tunnels with just a small torch in your hands comes with all the proper effects and shadows. While dynamic lighting effects from spells are not as crazy as in Diablo IV, they still look mighty good, and scary if it's a trap going off that makes your whole screen explode (time to restart from the last save).

Larian opted for real-time cutscenes which makes a lot of sense given how big the game is and its dynamic nature (pre-rendered cutscenes can't show your customized character). Still, during cutscenes, facial animations, and NPCs in general, look quite poor. No doubt, graphics are not the most important thing in an RPG like this, but considering that a lot of the gameplay is spent during dialogue, I wish they had invested a bit more time here. Textures on all characters and the environment look excellent though, even when you walk up close to them.

Hardware requirements of the game are quite light, actually even a bit lighter than expected. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with Ultra settings you only need a Radeon RX 6600, Intel Arc A750 or RTX 3060. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you'll be fine with an RTX 3060, or Radeon RX 5700 XT. Even 4K60 is in reach for a lot of cards. For example, the Radeon RX 6800 non-XT gets 60.1 FPS, the RTX 3070 Ti 59.2 FPS and the RTX 4070 67.6 FPS. What's very important to achieve high framerates is that you need a powerful CPU. In our testing even the mighty Core i9-13900K was CPU-limited (at around 150 FPS) in many parts of the game, especially busy cities and similar hubs.

Baldur's Gate 3 has support for DirectX 11 and Vulkan—we've tested both. Surprisingly, there's very little difference between both renderers, they look exactly the same, the FPS are very similar, and even the minimum FPS, too. What I noticed is that Vulkan doesn't have much dynamic memory management. While DirectX 11 will always load and unload textures to manage VRAM optimally, Vulkan just seems to load everything that's nearby into VRAM and that's it. This is supported by our VRAM usage numbers, which are roughly 1-1.5 GB higher with Vulkan than on DX11. I also noticed a crash with the 4 GB Radeon RX 6500 XT, which suggests that the Vulkan renderer is not able to overflow VRAM into main memory, whereas the DX11 renderer has that ability. Given these results, my advice is to use DirectX 11, it looks the same, and seems to be more mature than the Vulkan renderer. While there's claims of smoother frametimes I have yet to notice any meaningful difference for that either. Do let us know your experience in the comments. The renderer does make a big difference for Intel Arc GPUs, which run considerably faster with DirectX 11.

Intel is also the only GPU vendor to have released game-ready drivers for Baldur's Gate 3. Good job! Not sure why NVIDIA and AMD are so slow, this actually seems to be a recent trend where Intel is beating the established top dogs. On the other hand, I haven't noticed any rendering issues during gameplay, so maybe the current drivers are already optimal. Considering the hundreds of thousands of gamers who bought the title, I still feel like giving them assurance by mentioning the game in the patch notes would be a sensible approach.

VRAM requirements are well-tuned, the lowest setting will happily work with with 3-4 GB cards and at higher settings you can scale up to 5-6 GB depending on the resolution. I guess that theoretically leaves room for higher-resolution textures or better models for 8 GB-class cards, but given the RPG-nature of the game it seems unlikely that they'll address this in a future patch.