Baldur’s Gate 3 earned widespread acclaim for its excellent world, story, combat, and graphics, becoming the highest-rated PC game of all time and the highest-rated game released this year tied to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, placing itself in pole position for the Game of the Year awards.
Still, no game is perfect, and everyone agrees that performance in the third and final act of Baldur’s Gate 3 is far from ideal. Larian Studios vowed to improve it in Patch 2 and the freshly released Patch 3, but there was little change with my configuration (AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB DDR5). Whereas I could easily play at 4K and maximum settings with Deep Learning Antialiasing (DLAA) in the previous acts, roaming in Baldur’s Gate forced me to use Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) in Balanced Mode, and even then, there were still frame drops and hitches.
I decided to try the DLSS 3 mod released this week by PureDark to see whether it made a significant difference in what seemed like a CPU-bound scenario.
My custom Baldur’s Gate 3 test involved moving from the Steel Foundry to the Sorcerous Sundries magic shop, passing on purpose through the busiest part of the titular city. As you can see in the capture obtained with CapFrameX, the average frame rate increased by 56%. However, the 1% and 0.2% percentile FPS figures barely saw an improvement of 5-6 frames per second, which meant the game still felt choppy even on such a high-end PC.
Of course, this isn’t a huge problem in Baldur’s Gate 3 since it’s not an action game, but performance in the Lower City remains unsatisfactory even with this DLSS 3 mod. Still, I’d rather play Baldur’s Gate 3 with Frame Generation enabled anyway. Keep in mind that, as usual with PureDark’s DLSS 3 mods, you will have to subscribe to his Patreon to get it.
Speaking of DLSS mods, NVIDIA’s Bryan Catanzaro, one of the minds behind Deep Learning Super Sampling and its constant evolution, said in a recent Digital Foundry roundtable he’s proud of people being able to create such mods.
Honestly, I think it’s amazing that it works. I’m very proud of that. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make DLSS general enough that it’s even possible to consider doing that. […] When I see people modding DLSS, it’s probably true that they don’t know all of the things that we’re trying to do to make DLSS Integrations of the highest quality, so I’m gonna expect that there’s gonna be some rough edges, I but I think it’s great that people are able to do it.
He also explained that doing the same thing with Ray Reconstruction (also known as DLSS 3.5) will be hard since it requires a much tighter integration with the game. At the same time, he said NVIDIA could improve the documentation available to the community, potentially leading to better DLSS mods in the future.
