I’ve personally been waiting for this moment since the full release of Baldur’s Gate 3—FSR 2.2 is now sitting pretty in the graphics options, ready to give you higher frame rates and a way better visual experience than the sparkling aliased nightmare of the first gen FSR it launched with.
Say what you want about upscaling, it sure can make a difference if you’re struggling to get the frame rates you want when you’re flailing around Moonrise Towers and Reithwin. But if you’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on an AMD graphics card, Steam Deck, or any other PC handheld, then you’ll likely have suffered with FSR 1.0 and the terrible image quality it delivers.
Even on the Ultra Quality settings FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 (to give it its full title) is horrid. But with the new FSR 2.2 update, patched into the latest version of the game with today’s Patch #4.
Curiously, the FSR 2.2 support isn’t mentioned in the patch notes, and I only noticed it while booting it up to have a mess around with Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Steam Deck. But, god damn, I’m now excited. Made my day, that has. Because specifically on the Steam Deck and other gaming handhelds—which almost exclusively use AMD graphics hardware—the game looks dreadful unless you’re playing at native resolution and then it can chug.
We’ve looked at whether you should employ DLSS or FSR in Baldur’s Gate 3 before, and the answer was absolutely not FSR at that point. Now, it’s going to be a lot closer. I’d still lean towards DLSS if you’re rocking an Nvidia graphics card, but FSR 2.2 looks sooooooooo much better than FSR 1.0 for those on AMD.
I’ve only messed around with it for a short time in my own game, having only just discovered it, but instantly you can see the difference even between the equivalent Quality modes of the two versions. With FSR 2.2 my game looks clean, though with a little aliasing due to the Steam Deck custom settings I’m rocking. Switching to FSR 1.0, however—which is probably only still there to highlight just how much better the new version looks—and suddenly the pixelated sparkle is back, where weird graphical artifacts now surround my battle-hardened crew.
Actually to the point where it’s just not playable.
It’s tough to see in a still image, especially without blowing it right up, but the FSR 2.2 version looks significantly better, to the point where I’d say it’s almost better than the native one up close.
On my Deck, without messing around with any other settings, I’m still getting around 38 fps with both FSR 1.0 and FSR 2.2. With more digging around I expect the first-gen option might deliver the odd frame or two extra, but for my money and eyeballs it’s certainly not worth the visual aggravation.
It’s been a minute since we last heard anything about FSR 2.2 getting added, with Larian previously suggesting it would come around about the same time as the PS5 version shipped, but that was back in September. But it’s been worth the wait, and now native Steam Deck, handheld PC, and any other Radeon GPU user is going to reap the benefits.
By Dave James for pcgamer