Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck is 'absolutely wild' and aims for 30FPS on Medium

...that'd be 640x800 resolution for each player.

Back when I was a kid, we got 320x240 if we were LUCKY, and we loved it! All the pixels were the size of your fist, but we didn't know any better. We just thought the world looked chunky.


Last edited by Renzatic Gear on 1 August 2023 at 3:20 pm UTC

...that'd be 640x800 resolution for each player.

Back when I was a kid, we got 320x240 if we were LUCKY, and we loved it! All the pixels were the size of your fist, but we didn't know any better. We just thought the world looked chunky.

Ha, 160x100 I think is roughly what the 2600 could do? Though there isn't really a defined capability of it.

320x200@16 is what the Atari ST could do... if I recall, the 'hi-res' mode of the Atari800 was 320x192!
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/275575-atari-graphics-modes-reference-chart/

Funny enough, I was recently looking through the info on the Dark Forces port to the Amiga, it ran at 320x200 as well.

No SD card?

Got a cheap 128 GB one a the time. To be fair, I use my deck mostly as a streaming device connected to my TV to watch Netflix and YouTube from my bed. Much better than having to use some proprietary smart TV software or Amazon TV stick trash.
Even just being able to use an adblocker for YouTube is worth it and I can use mouse and keyboard with it.

For this game I'd prefer Mouse and Keyboard anyways. Yes, I know there will be controller support, I played their last two Divinity games and while usable, it is simply inferior to a regular mouse and keyboard.

...that'd be 640x800 resolution for each player.

Back when I was a kid, we got 320x240 if we were LUCKY, and we loved it!

Luxury! We used to have to game in a paper bag in t'middle of the road!

Luxury! We used to have to game in a paper bag in t'middle of the road!

You had a WHOLE paper bag? When I was real young, all we had was an old stick covered in mud with a single pixel stuck on the end.

You had a WHOLE paper bag? When I was real young, all we had was an old stick covered in mud with a single pixel stuck on the end.

Uphill trough lava on both ways…


Last edited by Klaas on 1 August 2023 at 6:29 pm UTC

Uphill trough lave on both ways…

You know it.

It wasn't lava though. It was snow. Lava would've a bridge too far.

I have fond memories of playing Baldur's Gate when it first came out.
When I got it home and opened the box and saw it was 5 CDs
That was complete craziness at the time lol

Yeah, Baldur's Gate is a great series of games, I'm actually surprised they made a BG3, I thought that ToB ended things pretty conclusively. It's gonna be interesting seeing a really high level campaign now that CHARNAME is a deity (or at least at the power level of one).

AFAIK, it's not another tale of the Gorion's Ward. Tho, it seems Minsc returns (I mean at this point Gorion's Ward is just a cardboard cutout and the party is the topic, with Minsc being such a character he remains today no matter what)

Maybe good, maybe not, unlikely to really be a BG and more another game of the studio. Seems fine. I'll likely play it so.

Just realized this has been early access for awhile, and rather excited.

Will this be an actual native port of just Proton? On EA, at least, they have a Windows and OSX port.

@williamjcm, @officernice:

I bought and played the Early Access of Baldur's Gate 3 over the weekend on my computer with an AMD 7900XTX GPU using Fedora Silverblue... and it played perfectly fine in DirectX 11 mode, including vegetation and all. Choosing Vulkan directly didn't work, but I didn't try experimental or GE yet, just the latest version of standard Proton 8.

(Of course, this was Early Access, and not the release version of the game. We'll have to see how well it plays on Thursday. As they're targeting the Deck, it should _theoretically_ run fine on desktop Linux too. The only game that's worked well on Deck and not on the desktop that I ran into was We Love Katamari, which needed the environmental variable `SteamDeck=1` on the desktop to work well. )

Choosing Vulkan directly didn't work, but I didn't try experimental or GE yet, just the latest version of standard Proton 8.

I ran the Vulkan rev on my now ancient Geforce 970ti using both the latest Proton-GE, and Experimental, and it worked fine. I believe the developers would prefer people use Vulkan to play the game, but from my, admittedly unscientific very half-assed experimentations, I didn't notice much of a difference in quality or performance.


Last edited by Renzatic Gear on 2 August 2023 at 9:40 pm UTC

Hmm, I can't confirm without the game, but there are reports that look like Vulkan on AMD is working.

It might have worked at some point, but clearly not anymore.

Also, the first report I saw when I clicked that link you posted said the Vulkan renderer did crash their Steam Deck when trying to load the main menu, which was also my experience when I tried it yesterday on my own handheld, and the average RADV experience.

AMDVLK, the official Linux driver, crashes more "gracefully" (the game displays an error message instead of crashing the entire driver) during the Larian video before the main menu.

Hmm, I can't confirm without the game, but there are reports that look like Vulkan on AMD is working.

It might have worked at some point, but clearly not anymore.

Also, the first report I saw when I clicked that link you posted said the Vulkan renderer did crash their Steam Deck when trying to load the main menu, which was also my experience when I tried it yesterday on my own handheld, and the average RADV experience.

AMDVLK, the official Linux driver, crashes more "gracefully" (the game displays an error message instead of crashing the entire driver) during the Larian video before the main menu.

The issue with the link seems to be an issue of the protondb website. If you go to the address bar and press return there once the site finished loading, the anchor works.
Here is a screenshot of the report I wanted to link.


Be as it may, I might buy the game today and try it myself. If it doesn't work with good performance on my AMD GPU I'm going to be sad.

Be as it may, I might buy the game today and try it myself. If it doesn't work with good performance on my AMD GPU I'm going to be sad.

I've bought it on GOG and both the Vulkan and DX11 versions are running fine on my RX 6600. The only thing I did was setting a custom executable instead of the launcher. Played a bit with both versions but didn't spot major differences.

The only bad thing I noticed so far is that it will not work unless Galaxy is also running. Kinda defeats the purpose of buying from GOG in the first place.

Be as it may, I might buy the game today and try it myself. If it doesn't work with good performance on my AMD GPU I'm going to be sad.

I've bought it on GOG and both the Vulkan and DX11 versions are running fine on my RX 6600. The only thing I did was setting a custom executable instead of the launcher. Played a bit with both versions but didn't spot major differences.

The only bad thing I noticed so far is that it will not work unless Galaxy is also running. Kinda defeats the purpose of buying from GOG in the first place.

I got the Steam version, but didn't really play yet. However, as far as I tried it (the character creation menu), it's running fine on my Rx 6700 XT. The only things I needed to do to get it to launch was to switch to Proton Experimental, and to disable the launcher (to be honest, I don't know if disabling the launcher is necessary, I just hate launchers).

A shame the current version of the game doesn't run on AMD GPUs on Linux (except Steam Deck, it seems) if you select the Vulkan renderer, no matter if you use AMDVLK or RADV drivers.

The D3D11 renderer does work, but vegetation has some nasty flickering.

I really hope it'll be fixed for the game's launch.

I dont understand, im on Debian 12, last stable MESA (RADV), with an AND RX6600XT and it runs out of the box.
I dont have any workaround, command launch option or anything like that, bought and installed trought Steam, select Proton GE 8.4, and go (i have not disabled anything).
Maybe it was not working before official release ? i have installed it yesterday, created my character, and played it like 2 hours without any issue.


Last edited by DebianUser on 4 August 2023 at 4:09 pm UTC

Maybe it was not working before official release ?

Yes, it was completely borked in the last early access build.

A shame the current version of the game doesn't run on AMD GPUs on Linux (except Steam Deck, it seems) if you select the Vulkan renderer, no matter if you use AMDVLK or RADV drivers.

The D3D11 renderer does work, but vegetation has some nasty flickering.

I really hope it'll be fixed for the game's launch.

Yeah, the launch version had it fixed. I chose Vulkan and everything worked out of the box on launch day.

A shame the current version of the game doesn't run on AMD GPUs on Linux (except Steam Deck, it seems) if you select the Vulkan renderer, no matter if you use AMDVLK or RADV drivers.

The D3D11 renderer does work, but vegetation has some nasty flickering.

I really hope it'll be fixed for the game's launch.

Yeah, the launch version had it fixed. I chose Vulkan and everything worked out of the box on launch day.

Yeah, I noticed it too.

I'll be honest, I'm glad Larian gave it some love, because we need more Vulkan games around. Shame it still has a D3D11 renderer, which shows games on custom engines aren't willing to fully ditch proprietary APIs yet.

I'll be honest, I'm glad Larian gave it some love, because we need more Vulkan games around. Shame it still has a D3D11 renderer, which shows games on custom engines aren't willing to fully ditch proprietary APIs yet.

A transition period is perfectly reasonable. Don't let great be the enemy of good, ya know? Good is on the way to great.

Sniper Elite 5 also has a Vulkan option, and that game is technically impressive! The graphics look better than the 4th game yet impressively perform noticeably smoother with my same hardware. It's a delight.