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

@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. )

Quoting: garrettlChoosing 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

Quoting: soulsourceHmm, 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.

Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: soulsourceHmm, 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.

Quoting: soulsourceBe 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.

Quoting: kaiman

Quoting: soulsourceBe 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).

Quoting: williamjcmA 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

Quoting: DebianUserMaybe it was not working before official release ?

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

Quoting: williamjcmA 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.

Quoting: 14

Quoting: williamjcmA 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.