Is there any news on a fix for the 'black map' issue, wherein the mini and Main maps only display markers on a black background?

I'm running Version 4.1.1.3732833 on an AMD FX-8350 machine with a GTX-970 card. It passed the 'compatibility' test with no problems, and the rest of the game runs fine. I just can't see any actual terrain on the map.

Advice on other forums that discuss this issue suggest just using the 'cheater' maps that are becoming available online, but I hate to take away the fun of discovering new terrain on my own.

Has anyone here had the problem and fixed it?

Thanks in advance,
JB

I'll post this before someone else does: Are you running any mods?

I haven't seen this issue, so I don't have any specific advice... but easily 70% of the time when someone posts with a bug on this forum, someone else says "disable your mods and start a new game" and it magically works.

If it's not mods, it might be the fact that you're trying to play with exactly the bare minimum requirements according to https://larian.com/support/faqs/system-requirements_47... and that assumes you actually have 8Gb RAM. Are you running vulcan or DX11? Are your video drivers fully up-to-date? What about your BIOS, microcode, peripheral drivers, etc? Have you throttled the graphics settings all the way down? Have you killed all other running processes, overlays, browsers, and basically anything else that might use GPU resources?

What is your screen resolution? Are you trying to run at like 4k or something?

It seems dumb, but have you run a disk diagnostic recently? Any chance you wrote to a bad sector and/or have a corrupted resources file, and so far it's only noticeably manifested by preventing the map artwork from loading?

That said - and keep in mind this is a data point of 1 - the only time I tried to run an AMD CPU with an Nvidia card, I had all kinds of problems when gaming. It can't think of any logical reason for this, and maybe it was a fluke, but I stuck with Intel/NVidia from that point on (I had an Intel/AMD machine that sucked, too, but I think that was mostly because AMD drivers were garbage... but striking out both times was enough misery to make me superstitious.

I'm really sorry you're dealing with that, though. That would make playing COMPLETELY miserable, and would totally ruin my playstyle. I did have one brief game in EA where the maps were black and it made the game unbearable, but I just quit playing for a bit and one of the subsequent patches fixed it.

You might try the Larian boards. The developers actually read those, and you're far more likely to get someone who knows what would cause the maps to fail to load there than here.

Sorry I can't be more help, but I hope you find a solution.

the issue is his system and its well known for bottlenecking on games which need Ram to make things pretty... i assume it only passed the 'compatibility' test because BG3 doesn't actually know what th hardware is

yes try lowering setting or adding more system Ram 'may' get it working but really the best fix is to upgrade your hardward

I am in fact running with 16 GB of RAM and no mods of any kind. I'm using DX11, and my drivers are up to date. As I stated, the game shows no performance issues of any kind; the camera POV pans smoothly with no glitches, etc. When running, the game is only using about 13 GB..

And there is no way that the compatibility app is unable to verify my RAM and other system attributes; I am a software developer myself and I can tell you that these things are absolutely trivial to determine. So either the compatibility program has a bug, or the game does. Since others (with a wide range of hardware) have reported this problem on Reddit and other forums, I'm betting it's the game. It has been reported to Larian, and they say 'they're working on it'. We had hope that Patch 3 had the fix, but it did not. Some users have fixed the blank map by 'downgrading' to Vulcan, but that DOES cause performance issues, enough so that the game becomes unplayable.

Mathaetaes, thanks for the the thoughtful reply. I'll keep looking.

JB

Technically, your machine *does* run the game, which is probably all the compatibility test is checking. It just doesn't run it well enough to consistently load all the graphics. :(

16Gb should be plenty of RAM. I'm only using 4 right now (though I've seen it grow quite large, especially in Act III, but I don't think I've ever seen it larger than 16. However, the VRAM on 970 will also be a limiting factor, and is probably more relevant than system ram.

You said you see other people complaining - do you know if this affects both GOG and Steam purchases?

Another long shot - but have you tried running windowed at a low resolution? I'm not proposing that as a solution, but it would be a potentially useful datapoint.

Unfortunately, I don't see much in the way of diagnostic logs when I go poking around my system, so you might just be at the mercy of Larian's devs.

It might be instructive to see if others with this complaint have anything similar in their systems to OP's system.

Mathaetaes, you mentioned VRAM; I'm running 4 GB in my GTX-970.

In other news, I have tried the various suggestions of reducing the graphic workload. I went through every video option and reduced it to the lowest or next-lowest setting. Also ran at the lowest possible resolution, etc. Nothing had any effect on the problem.

I think it's significant that when I selected "Auto-Detect" to reset graphic settings, it set every video option to either 'high' or 'ultra'. That implies that the game designers think my graphics system was more than powerful enough to run the game properly.

The whole idea that the 'blank map' problem is caused by graphics systems at the bottom end of the 'allowable' range just seems unreasonable. For one thing, software companies generally set these 'minimum requirements' very conservatively (i.e., tougher than they strictly need to be), because they don't want users getting poor performance and trashing the product to their friends. Also, displaying a simple 2-D top-down map is just not that computation intensive, especially compared to the ray-tracing that has to be done to fly the POV camera around in real time. Which works perfectly on my machine, as I mentioned.

I've enclosed a few links to other forum's postings about the problem. A search for "blank map in Baldur's Gate 3" will show many more. A few things stand out:
- It's being reported by users from all sources (Steam, GOG) and all machines, even PS5s.
- Although some complainants are indeed running below-minimum systems (GTX-670s, etc.), most do not seem to be.
- Some users upgraded to much higher-grade graphics cards and still had the problem.
- The 'early access' version of the game did not have the problem.

Ah well, the forum will not let me post any links. The aforementioned search term will bring them up in large numbers.

Thanks to all of you who have given this your attention.

JB

I'm playing in the underdark right now (far from the graphics load of Act III), and the windows performance monitor tells me I'm using 5.6/8GB of VRAM. I think I'm running under vulcan, with close to max settings (I had to turn down a few things to make Act III less laggy, and I never turned them back up), on a 3070Ti.

It's not really apples to apples because I'm running 3 1920x1080 displays, and I've got stuff other than BG3 running that shouldn't be using a lot of VRAM, but developers are lazy and will readily grab more hardware rather than optimize their software, so it could be. Stuff like slack, itunes, firefox, etc.

It's not close to a solution to your problem, but maybe it's a helpful datapoint.

If PS5 users are reporting it, though, that should rule out hardware entirely... unless it's related to seek time and some people have more full hard drives. Do you have anything in common with those folks?

You're a software developer - you know the process for troubleshooting these things. Figure out what's common among the people experiencing the problem, then start testing under those conditions. Based on the lack of response on these forums, it doesn't sound like many forums readers here are having that problem.

I assume you've tried uninstalling, purging all the localdata folders, and reinstalling. And I assume you've got adequate free disk space. I don't work for Larian, but if it's not hardware, and it's consistent despite creating multiple games with multiple different character names, and it happens every time you start the game despite system reboots, then the only thing I can think of is that it's a corrupted install, or something related to disk i/o (capacity, speed, file permissions, etc). PS5 users are all on exactly the same hardware, right? so you'd have to look at the difference between a PS5 that works and a PS5 that doesn't to get clues as to the cause.

if it were intermittent, I could guess maybe a race condition or something. I suppose that's still possible if the race condition occurs at the start of a new playthrough and somehow gets persisted in the save files, but a reinstall + wipeout of all persisted data should, I would think, re-run that race and give people a chance at winning it. I'm sure if as many people as you say are having this problem, people have tried that without success, which points to something deterministic.

As for EA not having the problem - I'm not sure that's relevant. The full version has so many additional variables that comparing to EA probably won't lead to a solution.

I wish I could help more :(

what it implies is Larian cut corners and the auto-detect is in fact just spitting out a default without testing anything

for example everytime the game crashes it also resets to default settings which is always Ultra vid, high auto, karmic dice, tutorials on, 25 saves and shake screen... this is why systems that crash once are going to then crash over and over because all your custom settings have been wiped