Larian Achieves Breakthrough With Baldur's Gate 3 On Xbox Series S

Sounds like some certain scenes were getting a bit too busy for Series S to properly process. My guess is that either OS or other resources were taking up the VRAM that was needed to process those scenes adequately and it was causing either massive frame drops or full crashes. Likely the same bottleneck that’s been causing issue with split screen on Series S.

Sounds like a solution has been achieved, but what said solution is I couldn’t be sure. Maybe MS showed them how to dial back the systems usage of RAM/VRAM, or they reengineered the game engines handling of those peaks.

That’s a pretty significant drop in peak resources! Looks like the engineers had a breakthrough in their engine to cut peak RAM/VRAM usage by what looks like 50%! Hopefully this will carry over to other platforms!

See, and people said the Series S was bad for games.

In this case, the technical constraint actually put things under a bigger microscope and lead to breakthroughs in resource management!

@GamingFan4Lyf I was thinking this same thing. I hate the term “lazy developers” cause that’s not true/accurate in a lot of cases, like this one.

People don’t really think about how the coding side of things works in games, but the easiest analogy I can think of is you have 4 people all taking turns painting a picture. Say they’re trying to copy the Mona Lisa. Each one adding a portion to the overall picture on every pass - a lot of times without giving direction on the next step that should happen / the steps that have happened already. It’s very hard to achieve an exact outcome when one person is in control, let alone when you add multiple hands to the project. So each piece of the Mona Lisa is going to look different, and may not align properly.

Instead of going back through to clear code and tidy things up, it’s usually brute forced through processors and ram. This is especially true for pc titles where system specs vary wildly and it’s just easier to allow the code bloat.

The awesome addendum to it all though is when the code gets heavily optimized for a lower end spec, like with BG3 here, just how much extra you’ll benefit on the higher end side of things. Doom 2016 was a prime example of amazing coding to the point where that same game runs fantastic on Switch and like 5mill fps on X/Ps5/Pc 😂

@GamingFan4Lyf Those graphs don't start at zero. It's pretty good but it's not 50%.

@karlhendrikse In my defense, I was looking at the picture on my phone and it was tough to see the numbers. I thought one said it went from ~5GB down to ~2.5GB.

Even still, ~500MB drop in peak system RAM usage and a ~1.2GB drop in peak VRAM usage is still impressive when every MB/GB counts!

@Dm9982 I actually look at Nintendo engineers as the pinnacle of engine creation. They work in a super constrained hardware environment and are able to achieve amazing results.

People can sit and argue that a game on Switch doesn't break 1080p or runs at 30fps; but fail to realize it's running on 2015 mobile hardware!

The creativity put into Tears of the Kingdom hasn't even been replicated on hardware significantly more powerful than a Nintendo Switch.

So if those engineers can achieve amazing results on such limited hardware, imagine what they could do with more powerful hardware.

I feel like the Series S is actually making developers do what Microsoft wanted people to do with the Series X|S architecture in the first place: code smarter! Sure, it may cause delays, but, just like this case, it has proven to have created positive results.

Forced optimization brings about a breakthrough. Who knew? I've never thought it was lazy developers as much as Optimization for lower end isn't a priority. It's also why games are absurdly large in file size these days. Hogwarts is about to land on Switch and its 7g. The original file is 68 or thereabouts on PS5. Either way I'm happy to get BG3 on the Xbox finally.

@Xbox_Dashboard @GamingFan4Lyf If ya wanna see “pinnacle” optimization you guys should look at NBA2k23 file size! /s

But seriously, how bloated are games gonna get before even one SD Card/SSD/HD isn’t enough?

The gaming as a whole is just eager to hit 20k rez and 1k fps….. but what about storage?!? We seem to have solved the loading issues this Gen, but next Gen storage is going to be an absolutely massive issue if it isn’t solved soon.

Thinking of Nintendo as pinnacle developers, which they are, they’re also absolute masters at file compression. I’ve noticed a few games downloaded at roughly 3-4gigs but unpacked to 12-15gigs. Being in a crappy internet area, I’d LOVE for that to be a thing with my Xbox. Instead of downloading Hogwarts at 70-80gigs and taking me all night, compress that waaaaay down, and let me download a file size of 20-30gigs instead!

Edit - Forgot to add that I’ve seen NBA2k on switch isn’t much better off, somewhere around 50-70gig last I heard, putting it at 1st or 2nd place for largest file size on Switch.

@Dm9982 I would not be surprised to see BG3 on the current Gen Switch in 6 months. Unlike most of the AAA industry, they seem very dedicated to optimization as the only major boundary against more eyes on their game. Publishers like EA who only look at profit margins, just makes gaming worse.

@Xbox_Dashboard I’d love that, and double dip if they decided to bring it switch. I’ve already got the Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter, Icewind, etc collection there, and that would complete it,

Still wishing they’d bring Divinity 1 over as well.