Baldur's Gate 3 PS5 Compared PC; Expert Test Brings Answers
The team from Digital Foundry took a look at the PlayStation 5 version of Baldur's Gate 3. Does the port to Sony's consoles present the same high quality?
More than a month has already passed since the release of Baldur's Gate 3 on personal computers. During this time, gamers and industry journalists have managed to take Larian Studios' RPG apart. Thus, since we already have considerable information about the PC version of BG3 it's worth juxtaposing this knowledge with the recently released PlayStation 5 port of the game, which is what the editors of Digital Foundry have traditionally done.
Those who had concerns about the quality of Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5 can rest assured, because the the expert's report shows that Larian Studios has prepared a very solid, though not problem-free, item for Sony devices.
Controls
First of all, testers focused on the gameplay using the DualSense controller. While at the beginning playing with the gamepad does not cause any difficulties, at the moment when our heroes get more abilities, maneuvering through the menu can be a bit cumbersome. In their opinion, the lack of mouse and keyboard support in the console version of the game deserves a minus. However, this is a matter of taste and personal preference.
The quality of the visuals
Let's move on to the element where everyone should rather agree, that is, the quality of the visuals. In this respect PlayStation 5 version looks almost the same as the PC edition on "Ultra" settings, which is not always obvious in such cases.
BG3 for Sony's console offers two graphics modes. The quality-oriented one has a native resolution of 1440p and maintains a stable 30 frames per second most of the time. In contrast performance mode (also 1440p) provides a smooth 60 fps, but at the expense of minor artifacts due to scaling (such as streaks on leaves).. Nevertheless, according to testers, the two options do not differ much in terms of visual quality.
Optimization
Unfortunately console release of Baldur's Gate 3 suffers from the same problems as the PC version, namely significant frame rate drops in urban areas beginning with the third act.. According to the report, at times the counter indicated as low as 20 fps.
"Inevitably, the third act's city areas are much, much heavier than the first act areas we tested, with performance dropping to the low 20s at worst. As far as I'm aware, these problems probably shouldn't occur before this section, since the many, many hours of gameplay that precede it don't contain as high a density of NPCs as this city does," one Digital Foundry spec explains.
Hope for imminent optimization improvements for BG3 was fanned by the game's director, Swen Vincke, who in an X/Twitter post published hours ago wrote that "the development team is getting closer to achieving the performance they originally aimed for." It wasn't elaborated on, but one can expect that the new features apply to both the PC and PS5 versions of the game.
