Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 3 is coming next week – hopefully it's got the "surprise" performance improvements Larian mentioned

Baldur's Gate 3 Karlach
(Image credit: Larian Studios)

Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 3 is set to launch in eight days, and while the devs haven't confirmed the content of the update, there's reason to hope some performance gains might be on the way.

"Patch 3 is coming September 21 with full support for BG3 on Mac," the devs say in a tweet. The tweet is light on details about the update, but it does an image recapping all the perfect scores the game has received from the media. (Check out our Baldur's Gate 3 review if you want to see the words that go with one of those numbers.)

Despite all the superlative praise heaped on Baldur's Gate 3 - quite deserved praise, too - the game is not without its issues. The most universal of the criticisms is that the game's performance takes a nosedive in the densely populated urban areas of its climactic third act, an issue that PS5 players are now starting to experience, too.

Previous updates have already offered some performance improvements, and developer Larian Studios is working on more. Last week, studio head Swen Vincke said in a tweet that "they had some setbacks but our code team is getting closer and closer to achieving the performance they originally aimed for - I think they'll manage to surprise everyone still. They're very motivated." Patch 3 feels like it might just be the time for some of those efforts to start paying dividends.

Of course, it seems the big focus for this patch is the introduction of Mac support. Mac's never been the go-to spot for computer gaming enthusiasts, but if it's what you've got, then it's better to be playing Baldur's Gate 3 than not. The previous two entries in the series also hit Mac computers back in the day, so there's a nice continuity here, too.

The devs once worried Baldur's Gate 3 would be so buggy it'd get 6/10 reviews. 

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.