Introduction

Baldur's Gate 3 is a new isometric top-down RPG game developed and published by Larian Studios, who are also behind the Divinity Original Sin RPG masterpieces. You control a party of characters on an epic adventure in and around Baldur's Gate city, facing off against extraterrestrial mind flayers, monsters, beasts and various human factions.

Baldur's Gate 3 offers players diverse paths to explore, various quest outcomes, and interactions with characters, companions, and monsters. The game combines turn-based combat and real-time exploration, creating engaging and challenging gameplay. Players must make morally complex decisions, form alliances or rivalries, and shape the destiny of the Forgotten Realms as the story unfolds.



Baldur's Gate 3 is developed using the company's in-house "Divinity Engine 4.0," which is a modified version of the engine used in Larian Studios' previous game, Divinity: Original Sin 2. While Divinity: Original Sin 2 uses the DirectX 11 API exclusively, BG3 now has support for Vulkan, too. The Divinity 4.0 engine is also adapted for the new D&D rules and has support for the new verticality in Baldur's Gate 3.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Baldur's Gate 3 on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at Ultra settings. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The game supports windowed, borderless and fullscreen
• V-Sync can be disabled, there's also a triple buffering option
• The FPS cap can be disabled completely, or selected from between 10 and 240 FPS

• The "Preset" menu lets you select from the following profiles: "Low," "Medium," "High" and "Ultra."
• Besides that there's plenty of additional options for fine-tuning
• The "Slow HDD Mode" will load more assets into VRAM, so that there's less storage activity

• NVIDIA DLSS is supported in Baldur's Gate 3, but only the 1-year old version 2.4 is included
• AMD FSR 1.0 is included, FSR 2.0 is not supported
• You may adjust the sharpening amount
• DLAA is available, too, listed under "Anti-Aliasing"
• Other anti-aliasing modes are "off," "SMAA" and "TAA"