I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.

Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running?

The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level.

(You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished)

The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.

Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.

It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.

Edit:

> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!

Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.

Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/

I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.

For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.

Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.

   Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.