Baldur's Gate 3 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Divinity 4.0 streams textures into a pooled VRAM budget. At High, most surface textures sit at 2K; Ultra loads 4K atlases for environments and characters. The difference between High and Ultra is rarely visible during gameplay — it shows mostly in close-up dialogue cutscenes. Below 6 GB VRAM at 1440p, Ultra triggers streaming hitches as textures page out. High is the practical ceiling for 6 GB cards; Medium costs almost no FPS but noticeably muddies stone and fabric surfaces.

Typical impact 8-25% · 14% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (14% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Act 3 Lower City is notoriously heavy. Shadow quality is the #1 FPS killer in dense urban areas — Medium saves 20% FPS in Baldur's Gate city.

Typical impact 3-10% · 8% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Model Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Sets the polygon budget and mesh LOD tier for character and object models. Higher settings load denser vertex buffers with more triangles, increasing the geometry processing load on the vertex shader and rasterizer stages. This also affects the number of draw calls submitted to the GPU command processor. On games using mesh shaders (DX12 Ultimate), higher model quality may engage meshlet-based rendering with finer-grained culling, partially offsetting the triangle cost.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Divinity 4.0 uses detailed character models with cloth physics. Act 3 (Lower City) has 50+ NPCs on screen — model quality directly impacts CPU here.

Typical impact 3-10% · 8% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Detail Distance at High (8% fps cost).

Sets the maximum draw distance for detailed props, decals, and small environmental objects. The rendering engine uses frustum and occlusion culling to determine visibility, but larger draw distances increase the number of objects passing the visibility test. Each visible detail object requires a draw call (or instance in an instanced batch), vertex buffer binding, and material state setup on the GPU command processor.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Controls the draw distance for small environmental props — barrels, candles, books, rubble, and foliage clutter. Divinity 4.0 uses instanced batching for these objects, but pushing detail distance to Ultra increases the number of visible batches and draw calls significantly in complex environments like the Emerald Grove or Lower City streets. High is a good compromise: it retains visible clutter within the typical combat playfield without loading distant props that the isometric camera rarely focuses on.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (5% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Baldur's Gate 3: BG3 implements HBAO-style ambient occlusion as a fullscreen compute pass over the G-buffer depth data. High runs a wider sampling kernel with more depth taps, producing soft, accurate shadowing in crevices, under furniture, and between stacked objects — most visible in dungeon and cave environments. Medium reduces the kernel radius and sample count, cutting the per-pixel ALU cost while preserving most of the grounding effect. Off removes the pass entirely for a modest but noticeable flattening of the scene, particularly indoors.

Typical impact 2-8% · 2% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Depth of Field at On (2% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Applied during in-engine dialogue cutscenes and the exploration camera, Divinity 4.0's DoF uses a circle-of-confusion bokeh blur that samples the depth buffer to determine focus falloff. When On, out-of-focus characters during conversations receive a separable Gaussian blur scaled by their CoC radius. The performance cost is mild — one additional post-process pass — but some players find it distracting during combat and dialogue. Turning it Off has a negligible FPS effect but substantially sharpens the presentation for players who prefer a clean image.

Typical impact 2-6% · 4% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend God Rays at Medium (4% fps cost).

Renders visible light shafts streaming through openings using screen-space radial blur or volumetric ray marching. The screen-space approach renders a radial blur from the light source screen position, sampling the occlusion mask (depth buffer tested against light direction). The volumetric approach ray-marches from each pixel toward the light, sampling the shadow map at each step. The cost is proportional to screen coverage of the effect and sample count.

In Baldur's Gate 3: BG3 uses a screen-space radial blur approach for god rays, sampling an occlusion mask derived from the depth buffer and radiating from the sun's screen position. The effect is most prominent in outdoor areas — the Sunlit Wetlands and Moonrise Towers exterior show obvious volumetric shafts. High runs more radial blur samples and covers a larger screen radius. At Low the shafts are shorter and lower-sample-count, visually subtler. In interior scenes the effect is rarely visible, so lowering this in outdoor-heavy sessions is a low-cost FPS recovery.

Typical impact 0-3% · 1% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Bloom at On (1% fps cost).

Produces a glow around bright light sources by extracting pixels above a brightness threshold and blurring them back into the scene. The implementation uses a bright-pass filter, followed by progressive downsampling with Gaussian blur at each mip level (4-6 levels), then re-compositing the blurred mips into the original image. The multi-pass nature means multiple fullscreen reads/writes, but each successive pass operates on a smaller buffer. Total cost is modest due to separable Gaussian implementation.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Divinity 4.0 implements bloom as a multi-stage downsample-then-Gaussian-blur composite — bright pixels are extracted at a luminance threshold, blurred across five progressively smaller render targets, then composited back into the HDR frame. The total cost is low because each successive blur pass operates on a smaller buffer. Turning bloom Off saves one post-processing composite pass; the image reads as harder and more clinical, which some players prefer. The FPS recovery is marginal — bloom is not a meaningful performance lever in BG3.

Typical impact 2-6% · 3% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Subsurface Scattering at On (3% fps cost).

Simulates light penetrating and scattering within translucent materials such as skin, wax, leaves, and marble. Screen-space SSS works by blurring the lighting result using a kernel shaped by the SSS profile (a sum of Gaussians fitted to real-world subsurface scattering data). The blur is applied in a separable post-process pass — horizontal then vertical — with kernel width modulated by surface curvature and depth. This produces the characteristic soft glow of light passing through thin features like ears and fingers.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Controls light penetration through skin and leaves. BG3 uses screen-space SSS — cheap but noticeable on character close-ups during dialogue.

Typical impact 2-15% · 1% fps cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at SMAA (1% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Baldur's Gate 3: Divinity 4.0 offers TAA as the primary option, using per-pixel motion vectors written during the G-buffer pass to accumulate sub-pixel jitter across frames. TAA effectively eliminates geometry aliasing on BG3's complex character silhouettes and fine dungeon geometry, but can introduce slight ghosting on fast camera pans. SMAA applies pattern-matched edge blending without temporal accumulation — sharper on static frames but less effective on thin geometry. Off exposes raw aliasing on the many diagonal surfaces and foliage cards. If DLSS or FSR is active their internal temporal component supersedes this setting.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Baldur's Gate 3: BG3 ships DLSS 2 integration — Tensor Core inference on NVIDIA Turing and later. The engine feeds the lower-resolution colour buffer, G-buffer motion vectors, and depth to the DLSS network, which reconstructs a near-native image. Quality mode (rendering at ~67% native linear resolution) delivers 30–50% FPS gains in Act 3 with minimal perceptible quality loss at 1440p and 4K. Balanced is recommended for 1080p to avoid the reconstruction network working with too few input pixels. DLSS largely supersedes TAA when active and pairs naturally with the game's dialogue close-ups.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Baldur's Gate 3, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Baldur's Gate 3: BG3 includes FSR 2 — Larian's integration uses the temporal accumulation path with motion vector and depth buffer inputs, giving hardware-agnostic upscaling on any GPU. The multi-pass compute pipeline (depth clip, motion dilation, luminance instability detection, Lanczos-weighted reconstruction) produces quality competitive with DLSS at Quality mode (~77% linear resolution). Ultra Performance (33%) is only viable at native 4K where the reconstruction network has enough source pixels. FSR 2's temporal component replaces TAA; enable it before adjusting the Anti-Aliasing setting. A strong choice for AMD RX 6000/7000 owners hitting VRAM limits at 1440p Ultra.