Bay 12 Games Forum

Sorry, I screwed up the VRAM count. My AMD Radeon R7 360 series only has 2 GB of it. Yeah, this thing's a brick from 2015, lol. XD

Hello! Thanks for checking this. I've been very interested in playing Baldur's Gate 3, but I balked at the system requirements. I think I can handle it for the most part, except that my graphics card is kind of a brick. If you would, please take a look at my specs, at BG3's specs, and recommend to me what I should get to run it without costing too much. Mainly, I want to know if I will need to change my motherboard to get a video card capable of running this beast. I'm not good about computer hardware.

My budget is around $300.

I will not be playing multiplayer of any kind. I'm not planning to stream gameplay. I don't need super high-quality graphics with bumpmapped water and wavy grass or anything like that; just "good enough" is fine with me, so long as faces don't turn out like wax dolls, etc. etc.

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My specs

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Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Z170-HD3P
Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.3GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM (DDR5)
DirectX 12
GPU: AMD Radeon R7 360 Series (18385 MB 2 GB total memory)

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BG3 requirements (minimum)

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Processor: Intel IT 4690 / AMD FX 8350
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)

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BG3 requirements (recommended)

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Processor: Intel i7 8700K / AMD r5 3600
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: Nvidia 2060 Super / RX 5700 XT (8GB+ of VRAM)

(I guess we're going ahead without notquitethere, for now.)

Tim feels a backwash—a tingle, spreading like an itch just under the skin, running like lightning from her hands all through her body. For a second, her vision swoons. Yet the magic yields to her control as easily as butter. Flames ROAR forth like the throes of a great dragon, sweeping the room! The black goat is incinerated instantly as its eyes boil, forelegs and head peel down to bone before the rest of it follows. The sudden rush of pressure swats its body to the side, crumpled amidst an inferno of burning furniture.

The chaotic magic in the book reacts to Tim's spell! Pages of old parchment flip in the hot air, seemingly immune to the blaze. Wyrd words glow ablaze with malignant force, and the power rushes for her like a magnet!!

FWOOOOOOSH!! All fire in the room BLOSSOMS upwards, leaving the ground behind as if something plucked it and tossed it in the air like rose petals. It splashes across the roof in a glorious display of dancing flame, but the mana feels... wrong. Twisted, in a similar fashion to how it does only fleetingly when Tim uses her die. Then... the fire slowly vanishes, like so much smoke.

It leaves behind only ashes. Ashes, and a scarred, moderately-burnt pyromancer... ...except the scars run too deep to be at all natural. Her chest looks burnt down to the ribs, but those have now fused together in a hideous but sturdy cocoon of intermeshed bone and... something that looks and feels like a kind of metal. Tim is able to move as she was before, not entirely unscathed... but not unchanged.

The locks on both doors click open...

The ghost of Mirabel raise a skeletal warrior to attack this foul Tim

(Sorry, but no, you don't. I'm gonna be limiting summons on rooms 'cause otherwise humans would get stuck in them for a while. You can still do stuff as a ghost, though! And if any humans level up while you're a ghost you'll gain more power. Also by damaging humans as a ghost.)

BÄÄÄÄÄ! The goat charges! Well, it tries. It does its best. The trip-and-belly-flop onto the slime-covered floor would be cute if it didn't leave it about a quarter covered in !!flaming slime!! It stumbles to its feet and hooks its horns at Mirabel like a crazed llama, but not fast enough to distract her before...

FWOUUUNG! A complex assemblage of arcane rules swirls around her, deflecting the charge of the snow sprite and sending it careening off against a wall. Mirabel's shield grows from her and spreads, pushing furniture and church pews away against a five-foot sphere of coruscating light. The poor goat chooses that moment, perhaps too blind with rage to stop, and that's when everything goes wrong.

PONG! The goat bounces, flips in the air, and lands with its horns impaled in the wood of a table. It has just enough to notice its !!fire!! spread to the furniture before something huge and slimy brushes up on it... and Mirabel notices a disturbingly long shadow stretching beneath her...


The slime rears up, falls over the goat, and lands atop Mirabel's shield with a wet splat. Admittedly, her magic might've looked like flame to a dumb slime creature. In any case, not even she can stop that much sheer mass, not to mention her shield was made for pointed impacts. Mirabel is squashed under the suffocating mass of pink goo, though thankfully she's knocked down with enough force to knock her unconscious before the flames and crushing mass do the rest.

But just as quickly as the mass of slime took shape, it melts away like ice sublimating to vapor in a matter of seconds, but leaving no trace of its body save rubbery clumps of bacon-thin slime and a pervasive smell of pork. The black goat's flame is mostly extinguished now, and it's still alive, but only just by a thread. Mirabel's crushed, burnt and bloodstained form remains, but... THERE! There is Tim, restored to full glory, standing with that dreaded 1d6 die in hand, as if nothing had ever happened to her! But the remaining spirits in the room don't feel much of a loss in the aura, for a new vengeful spirit takes Tim's place...

Just as Mirabel passes on a brisk run to the storage room, trailing a thin layer of blood in her wake, a certain pyromaniac ghost sneakily embeds itself into the alcohol-fumed barrels lining the corridor... and, though their contents've long since dried up, just the presence of the spirit's reality-bending touch is enough to set them going, and all it takes from there is a spark! That comes from the sword on its return trip, spanking off the wall right next to the barrels...

...just as Mirabel languidly draws a critical circular pattern in the air behind her with her staff...


Wood and metal shrapnel erupt along with the many-times-multiplied explosion, but all of it is just barely contained by the spiral shield left in Mirabel's wake. The force channels back down the corridor like a shaped charge, caving in the door to the torture room in a horrendous CRASH and leaving it lying off its hinges against the stones. She leaves behind three frustrated ghosts in her blackened and scorched trail.

The door to the storage room opens far simpler, only the second door in a day or more to do that for her. Inside is rather strange; what should be little but dust and old planks now hosts several crates bulging at the seams with an oozing, viscous flesh-like substance, pooling on the floor where it leaks from between boards like some kind of fungal overgrowth. The pink slime covers about a fourth of the chamber, and fills the air with the disconcerting smell of raw pork mixed with sweat and a hint of burnt hair. Where crates do not line the floor in rows, tables, chairs, a lectern with a strange book still on it, a toppled pew sitting with two legs missing in a corner, and even a standing harp for playing lie strewn about. This is where the original residents moved everything out from the room with the arcane patterns...

...creeeSLAAM. The door shuts behind Mirabel, locking her in! There is no escape except through blood! (Please see new ghost rules)

!NEW! !NEW!

What follows is less a fight than someone awkwardly trying to swat a fly with a stick. The snow pixie jinks away at first, with a crinkling sound of ice crystals that might be giggling. It rushes in to try and latch on—but is unexpectedly driven back by Mirabel's reflective wards! It recoils, but its momentary discomfiture is just enough for the staff to whip around and thrash it with decimating force!

FWOOOOSH—PING! PONG! It flies into a wall, bounces at a forty-five degree into another wall, then flies back to strike poor Lem in the back of the neck. The combined force of Mirabel's reflective spell plus the pixie's ethereal chill slices neatly into his spine, all too appropriately dropping him like a puppet.

The pixie winks out in a puff of snow. Lem's golem crumples into a cairn of stones on the floor, looking vaguely like an emaciated man with the iron bar driven through his chest from behind. Just another sad glorious addition to the torture room's ambiance.


Just outside, a row of forgotten torches glows on the walls as if pleased by the slaughter. Mirabel sees the corridor they came down before, cast in that eerie light. Discarded swords, shields, a few barrels that smell faintly of alcohol, plus a knocked-askew painting of some ancient feudal lord decorate the three-forked stone passage.

She knows the other rooms they investigated before now—one with the floor mostly dedicated to a strange, inactive magic circle; another for all the furniture moved from that room to make way for the pentagram; and a grisly trophy room filled with taxidermied animals, a display case of preserved heads, and worse.

The slaughtered humans know, too... they feel grim purpose and wrath fill their ectoplasmic forms! They're not gone just yet!

INITIATIVE

With implacable and deadly ease, Bobby Joe brandishes his deadly boomstick in white-knuckled hands! He levels it at Tim... at the same time as Lem barks a desperate incantation and the room floods with light!

BOOM! Buckshot sprays the room—ball bearings, coins, steel shavings, and the end of a fork dance with a sprinkle of rock salt through the air in a deadly ballet. The cone of pain narrowly skims Tim's shoulder as it sails past, pinging off rock, and... bigger rock?

A two-and-a-half meter slab of solid granite catches the rest on its immensely thick hide. A single glass eye chewed on by some long-forgotten cat rests inside an anvil-flat skull. A single arm dangling on a stick of iron like an awkward crane swings at its side.

The Dice Gods giggle at the human's hubris... <(1)>
FWOOOOOOOSH!!!
A titanic jet of flame belches from Tim's hands and scours the room! His erstwhile 'friends' are caught in the blast! Three figures—a human, a hulk of stone, and... a flash of purple...? vanish for a moment in the incinerating cloud.

Fortunately for Tim, everything goes wrong too fast to feel any pain.

The sheer force of the blast knocks him off his feet, shooting him back like a runaway rocket. Failing to keep his hands parallel and straight, he first flies up, slamming his back into the ceiling with a meaty crack. He continues on, scorching the walls black in a disconcertingly artistic pattern of a platypus' duck-like beak. It ends when Mirabel, throwing back some of the excess force, knocks him bouncing off two walls like a pinball before splattering on the floor.