Do I need a new computer to play BG3?

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I went from the circa 2009 Gateway 4200DX to a Dell Inspiron 3670. Intel Core i7-8700 CPU, 16gb RAM. NVIDIA GeForce GT1030. Only a single 2TB hard drive for now.
I had a long period where I was barely making ends meet, so I couldn't upgrade my phone or computer.

 

Eh, it's mostly fine, nowadays. My previous computer made 9 years, and mostly got replaced because of the random crashes. In the end, the OS harddrive failed, so maybe that was causing some of the crashes as well. In terms of games, I think only the witcher 3 or Metro 2033 could really make the old system show its limitations. With the consoles, there's just not that much need for very fast PCs, unless you like to have 120+ fps on three 4K monitors at once. Which would probably be pretty hard to get in any more demanding game even with todays top of the line hardware.

Not that there's been much progress in graphics cards in the past 5 years. That market has really stagnated.

Anyway, I spent probably 800 euro on SSDs and harddrives alone, maybe half that on the rest of the hardware. I like to have plenty of disk space.

Also, those specs are typical for pre-fab things. Expensive processor, but really bottom grade graphics card. A pretty poor combination for gaming. Mid-tier processor with high-mid tier graphics card would be much more appropriate, but probably isn't even an option with these wonky pre-fab things.

 

I couldn't find a way to build something better without spending more money. Graphics cards were running $300+, hard drives were in that expensive phase that lasted a couple months and starting at $120 for 500gb (they came down again), and that only left less than $500 for the case, board, processor, and monitor.
Yes, monitor unless you thought I should connect an old CRT to a modern system. Max resolution 1280x1024. Actually I'm using an old flatscreen like that as a secondary but I need to use the integrated video since the main graphics card lacks VGA ports.

Also I needed a new computer quickly because my Gateway had suffered a RAM chip failure, and not even Fry's had the correct DIMMs available in stock. I mail ordered the chips. This had reduced the computer to 2gb of RAM for VIsta or 7.
I didn't have anything else that could run the latest Chrome which I needed for work, and the last version supported by XP did not work with the company's website that I needed to access to put in my virtual timesheet. Going to the library every day after work got tiring.

 

Sometimes there's no choice, sure. I'm glad I have a backup laptop as fallback option, I needed that when WinXP wouldn't install on the new PC, because it didn't have any native USB 2.0 ports anymore, so XP couldn't recognise the keyboard and mouse attached to the PC.

 

That beats the min specs at least for BG3 so he shouldn't have a problem playing the game. I've been playing through the last two Divinity: Original Sin games from Larian; dang are the fights harsh. If BG3 is like that it's probably a good thing I can't run it because I'd never be able to finish it without turning it to "little kiddie mode" which makes me feel like I'm an idiot when I'm actually a pretty good tactician given half a chance. Back in college I belonged to chess club and I got the only win of the year against our chess king. I got a really lucky inspiration on how to trap his queen when he was demolishing me with her that used almost every piece I had remaining on the board and he was so surprised when he realized how I'd suckered him he forfeited even though he still had a substantial edge in pieces just to show his appreciation of my ingenuity; but a win is a win.

My disk drive wouldn't recognize on my last winXP machine so I gave it to my supposedly more computer savvy roommate; who proceeded to look online and the first link he found said to delete part of the registry. This of course destroyed WinXP so that it wouldn't boot anymore and of course I couldn't just reinstall my now unsupported WinXP so I ended up having to give it to a pro computer consultant friend who got me a corporate copy of Win7. This turned out to be a win-win for me because I use that computer as a gaming backup and all the game distributors like GoG and Steam no longer would work on WinXP systems. I have a better computer but I use that one mainly for my digital artwork.

 

The answer to the topic is no. (Ryzen 1600 X, amd 5600xt)

It appears that Cyberpunk ask a little less of the CPU and GPU on recommended.

 

There are video's on Youtube proving it runs okay on GT1030 with i3 CPU you yeah, it will run. Around 15-20 fps on Ultra settings so you might have to play on lower settings, but it will be still worth playing. I discovered that loading times are still annoyingly slow on a rotational Hard Disk (I don't expect your 2 tb disk to be SSD). A friend of me only had a 128 gb SSD for Windows and not enough space (80 gb in early access, and estimated 150 for the full game) available on SSD. On his rotational disk, it took 170 second from starting the game until the multiplayer-save game was loaded. I had a 500 gb SSD spare and we build it into his computer and moved his Steam library to there and the overall loading time improved to about 30 seconds. A 500 gb SSD is very affordable nowadays, about 50 dollars for 500gb, you'll never get such an improvement for such a small amount of money :-) With 500 gb you can install Windows on the SSd and have 450 gb available for the games you play most. And the other drive for other stuff, music, video's, pinctures, larger documents etc.

 

I have a 1 TB SSD for games, but even so, 150 GB is a lot of space for a game. Even The Witcher 3 is only around 50 GB, and BG3 looks nowhere near that good, if I'm honest. It all seems a bit unoptimised at the moment, hopefully that'll improve a bit.

 

For now it's 80 gb. Most of the content will be for the video's in the game.... also when you have conversations with people. Not the gameplay itself. And those parts do look good. I don't care much, I have a 500 gb portable ssd which I use as my Steam-library only. Nowadays, it's not much of an effort to uninstall games when you stop playing them and install them again when you start playing again. So when I lack space, I just uninstall some things I'm most unlikely to play again soon.

 

Feg; I hate it when I get distracted in the middle of writing a response and then can't post it because I need to log in again.

Anyways I'd take what Shadowcouncil says with the caveat that they often under-rate the minimum specs; you may find that the game is unplayable at minimum specs.

 

that’s why they usually tell what is required to play (low graphics, might be slow) and what is recommended. I think it’s still worth to play the game with low graphics though.

 

I wondered the exact same question 30 years ago when "Wing Commander" came out and had system requirements that had me wait to get the game until I had upgraded my PC to be able to run it. I still remember sitting in front of the PC, pushing all those 3,5" disks into the drive and waiting and waiting while the game extracted itself from them... If I remember that right my HDD back then was 200 MB (yes, MB).

If an excellent programmer and game designer have a vision of something and the standard average PC can´t run it - they should just as well create their vision. For most excellent games that worked out and gamers (who are upgrading faster than the usual PC-User anyway) kept up to play the games in wonder what had become possible.

Compromising the looks or the gameplay - so that your vision gets blurred and watered down and resembles the older games already around only will make the game less good.

Well I´m out of any new games - the first requirements of BG3 are a 64bit operating system (nope, still 32 bit) and 8 MB RAM Minimum/16 recommended (nope, 4GB because my 32 bit OS did not support more than 4 GB anyway...).

Maybe in 2021 I´ll get around and buy something with an AMD Ryzen in it...

 

:-) I just play on my work-laptop.... I'm a sys admin so I have more privileges like making second partition and run Windows there in Bootcamp (Mac-version of Baldur's Gate is blocked by my Antivirus, I can only bypass that for the whole organisation or make my own computer less secure so I run it in Windows.)

Haven't had my own game-pc for 10 years. Always a laptop with mediocre performances. Got a 16 inch Macbook Pro a couple of months ago so finally a laptop with good gaming performance. Very happy with it.

 

That problem can be avoided. In most BIOS there is a legacy option for USB keyboards - without the keyboard won´t be recognized e.g. in the BIOS settings. With BIOS and Windows XP (SP3) will recognize the keyboard.

 

I tried that, but ultimately it didn't work. Something to do with the motherboard not having any native USB 2.0 ports anymore, and no matter the options I used in the BIOS (UEFI, actually, which superceded the BIOS some 10 years ago, generally), Windows 7 wouldn't recognise mouse or keyboard (though the UEFI did). Even using a PCIe car with USB 1.0 slots didn't work.

Oh well, that's neither here nor there. If I play BG3, it'll be years from now, though that means little in the hardware that I have, as I will probably only upgrade once the hardware starts failing. But hey, that also gives them time to improve the performance of the game.

 

in that case it is nog "native". Would be very bad programming though, if a game would require native USB2.0 to install and will fail on either usb3.0 or a usb-adapter.

 

If I'd had a PS2 mouse still. Of course my motherboard doesn't have a PS2 port anymore (not sure if my previous one even had one).

This is regarding a side note on installing an older Windows version on newer PC hardware. For a game it really shouldn't matter if a mouse or keyboard or controller is connected by USB 2.0 or USB 3.0. If it was, they'd gotten something fundamentally wrong. Normally Windows should arrange the interface between the game and USB stuff, and usually it does. Just not when it's installing itself, apparently.

 

Heck, most keyboards and mice use USB 1.0 or 1.1 as they don't need a lot of power or a particularly high data transfer rate, and that way they can work with any USB system.