Why Baldur’s Gate III is an accidental PS5 console exclusive
Why Baldur’s Gate III is an accidental PS5 console exclusive
Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup.
Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup.
I was looking up more information on why there’s such an issue getting BG3 on Xbox, and found this article with a lot more detail on the topic.
EDIT: The issue isn’t graphics or frame rate; it’s memory. The article goes into detail.
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I’ve played this game a bit and I really don’t understand why it can’t be scaled down visually to work. It’s not some game that needs to target high fps or something.
I really wish people would read articles before commenting. I went looking for an article like this specifically that talks about the issues involved and folks can’t even be bothered to read beyond the headline. 😞
I guess I’m having trouble wrapping my head around why this game needs such high specs.
Because you're focused on the visuals from a single user perspective...
- There's the world state and game logic to consider as well, and this would be relevant even in a 2D sprite based game.
- The article makes it clear that it's the couch co-op split screen that is causing the most headaches, with whatever additional overhead there is in maintaining another active character and rendering of the world on screen.
because split screen requires rendering stuff twice. and also needing to keep more stuff in memory simultaneously, depending on what two players might have in their field of view, instead of just one.
also, reducing the (subjective) quality by half, does not necessarily mean that you are now using half the resources. And also your game would look like shit compared to its contemporaries
The problem isn't scale, the problem is rendering the game twice for split screen with only 10GB of RAM.
To put this in perspective, the Xbox ONE X has more ram than the Series S. 12 vs. 10.
If you want to solve that problem purely by scaling the graphics, yeah, I bet they could do it in 640x480...
I guess what I’m really wondering is, is this game unoptimzed causing it to need higher specs?
It's not that it's unoptimized, it's that running split screen requires 2x resources, resources the Series S does not have.
if you have X amount of work to do, you can't just "add optimization" and somehow you'll have less work to do.
if a game needs all the resources, then a well optimized game would still require all resources. but the unoptimized one would just not run properly.
optimized means "it uses the hardware efficiently". bg3 is a very well optimized game. it uses the hardware efficiently, and it uses all of the hardware. at a particular point, the only optimization left to do, is to do less work, i.e. to cut content.
optimization isn't some magic sauce you add to computer code to make it run faster. optimization is about writing good, performant code. at some point it's going to get as good as it can get.
the reason it needs higher specs than previous games is that it is doing a lot more than previous games. there is more work to do. what you're saying is akin to "this tiny car can do 100mph. why doesn't mine also do 100 mph when i stuff it full of bricks and give it a smaller engine?" well, it's because it has a lot more weight to carry, and less engine to do it with
The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won't cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.
RAM is the big bottle neck here.
Here's the comparison:
PS5: 16 GB/256-bit GDDR6 SDRAM
512 MB DDR4 RAMSeries X: 10 GB/320-bit & 6 GB/192-bit (16 GB total)
Series S: 8 GB/128-bit & 2 GB/32-bit (10 GB total)
But more than that, it's the speeds involved:
PS5 Peak Bandwidth 448 GB/s
Xbox Series X 10 GB 560 GB/s and 6 GB 336 GB/s
Xbox Series S 8 GB 224 GB/s and 2 GB with 56 GB/sSo not just less RAM, but at 1/2 the speed.
Why would you load a texture twice in memory? Especially if it's for the exact same object? It only needs to be rendered twice the texture stays the same and therefore only need to be stored once in ram...
He didn't say load a texture twice, he said twice the textures - which is a worst case scenario, but you could get if the players aren't near to each other.