How to improve Baldur’s Gate 3 PC performance with one quick trick

Are you wondering how to improve Baldur’s Gate 3 PC performance? We’ve got an FPS-fixing tweak that could seriously boost those frames.

Dialing in the perfect PC settings for a seamless Baldur’s Gate 3 experience isn’t straightforward, especially when Act 2 and beyond can throw up pesky performance problems.

Baldur’s Gate 3 can be heavy when multiple NPCs or effects are onscreen, even on beefy gaming rigs. Though here’s an odd little trick, you can bypass the Larian Launcher, boot the game via Steam, and watch your FPS rise from sorry to stellar. 

Though it might sound crazy to most, it’s true. When we attempted it, an Nvidia RTX 2070 at 1440p went from an unplayable 20FPS crawl to a smooth 30+ just by skipping Larian’s clunky launcher and firing up Baldur’s Gate 3 directly via Steam.

Before jumping in, there’s one more call: DirectX 11 or Vulkan. Choose wisely for a buttery-smooth experience.

Disable Larian Launcher to improve Baldur’s Gate 3 PC performance

Larian Studios

There are two methods for disabling Larian Launcher, either through Steam, or bypassing it through Windows. We’re assuming that you’re going to be using Steam to open the game, and you need to follow these steps:

• Open Steam and right-click on Baldur’s Gate 3
• Select “Manage” and click on “General”
• Select the text box under “Launch Options”
• Input “–skip-launcher“

Alternatively, you can navigate to your Baldur’s Gate 3 installation directory, enter the “Bin” folder and choose from either the bg3.exe file (Vulkan) or the bg3_dx11.exe file (DirectX 11) and boot the game from there, bypassing Larian Launcher entirely.

It’s a curious trick, but one that seems to really work, especially as you approach the busy environments in Act 2. If your Baldur’s Gate 3 installation is crashing, be sure to check out this guide, instead.

Can’t get enough Baldur’s Gate 3 content? We’ve published everything you could possibly want here.

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