Hello fellow players. A couple of friends and I are thinking about getting BG III on Steam Deck with the intention of playing together. However, what’s stopping us from buying it is the mixed reviews when it comes to performance. We’ve mostly been Switch gamers, so graphics are not really an issue. Some people say it’s playable, but we’ve also seen reviews bashing on it since they say it really isn’t playable (but some PC players consider anything under 60fps to be unplayable). And as we know, sadly the verified status doesn’t always guarantee it works great. So, is it possible to maintain a stable 30fps after all these months? Does it make a difference having it installed on the Deck’s internal memory or on an SD? Is it worth it to experience it for the first time through the deck? Thanks in advance for the answers.
I’ve heard a lot of praise - I’ve also seen it run absolutely abysmally in act 3. Dropping into the teens.
Anyone can play however they want, but I will point out that you arnt getting to act 3 till a solid like 50 plus hours into the game (and that’s probably skipping a lot of content, doing main story) so it doesn’t play game breaking my bad, has frame rate dips in that act for sure, as well as some bugs that I think they’ve been ironing out, but for moneys worth sort of deal for me, I think I got next to 200 hours with various characters without ever hitting act 3, and so that’s still worth on steam deck for me for sure.
I’ve heard even on desktop Act 3 has very poor performance.
Good news is that the dev just had a major breakthrough on optimization as they work on the xbox version which I assume would be out in the next patch or two for the other platform as well.
Yeah I’m pretty sure act 3 runs pretty bad on everything. That’s good if they figured out a fix though
Runs fine overall, with the new improvements they keep making it’ll only get better.
Totally worth it 🤘
It works. Graphics are pretty shit and frames dip from time to time but otherwise playable. Just depends on your tolerance for those kind of things.
I did a full play-through a month or two ago solely on Steam Deck. I had a great time. Performance does get a bit iffy in Act 3 (sub 30fps in intense areas), but turning off dynamic crowds and turning FSR on helped quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t think Act 3 performs at a stable 30 fps on PS5 either. Not sure if that has been patched yet. If you’re used to the Switch, there shouldn’t be a terrible amount of concern here.
I’m actually looking forward to another play-through once my OLED comes in. There also should be a decent performance update once they release the Xbox version, as they found an optimization that reduces VRAM usage. Either way, I’m happy with the game and could recommend it if expectations are kept in check.
This and Remnant 2 are my first purchases if 30 fps for 90% of the time without regular crashes are possible
I played it all in SD, worse is act3. Average 28FPs. Enjoyable and pretty much worth it
I have it locked at 30, and it stays there to the most part, but there are some dips to mid to high 20s in more demanding situations. I’m only a few hours in, but so far I have no complaints. I’m running it off an SD card.
Played it with my wife. Graphics didnt look good, but since I wasnt bound to my pc downstairs i could cuddle wihle playing - which was even better :)
BG3 is fantastic on the Deck, IF you have a desktop to stream it from. I tried both playing it natively at the locked 24fps preset that was popular at launch, and streaming from my desktop on Ultra settings at 60fps. Once I tried it streaming, I couldn’t go back to native.
It just depends how tolerant you are to frame dips or lag. It’s a turn based game, so it’s not going to get in the way of the game unless it bothers you. I think it runs well enough, and it’s great to be able to continue playing during travel
BG3 player here. I bought exclusively for my steam deck and it’s well beyond playable. At times the character models can look like Swiss cheese, but I can overlook it as long as the game runs and plays well, which I think it does.
Fellow former Switch gamer here, so my expectations might be in line with yours when it comes to performance and visuals.
I think the game is worth playing on Deck. The game has three acts. The first act always had solid enough performance on Deck if you approach it with Switch expectations. The second act used to be borderline, with some pretty rough dips but mostly still not below low 20s range. The third act used to be horrendous - think 15FPS or lower while panning or rotating the view, and barely more than the low 20s while doing nothing. That’s where most of the serious performance complaints came from, and this has been improved significantly since launch.
I won’t promise you can get a stable 30FPS in act 3 - not in the overword anyway. Too much going on CPU-wise. But if you’re happy locking to low-to-mid 20s, it’s very playable, and IMHO still very enjoyable, as it’s a very slow-paced game. I should point out that I mostly play at 8-10W TDP cap, but have occasionally uncapped TDP to see if it makes a difference - in my experience it usually didn’t gain me more than a few FPS - not enough to justify burning through battery for me personally, but YMMV.
FWIW, I’m only playing on Deck and I have it installed on the SSD. I might be less inclined to rate the experience favorably if I was jumping back and forth between a gaming desktop and my Deck, but I only game on Deck.
I bought SD specifically for BG3 and i’m absolutely thrilled, and the most recent update makes the graphics look like 3x better with netter performance due to FSR.
I’m probably at 100 hours on steam Deck. Having a great time