Hogwarts Legacy has some performance issues on PC, but you can make it run better with some simple … [+]
I’ve been playing Hogwarts Legacy on both PlayStation 5 and PC for a couple of different reasons. I started on PS5 but soon realized that it was going to be a family competition to see who got to play at any given time. Having another copy on Steam meant that I could play out in my office while my 12-year-old went on his adventure in the living room. Everybody wins (until my 15-year-old decides she wants to play also).
The other reason is work-related: I wanted to see how the game performed on PC compared to consoles. It runs great on PS5, but what about PC? Well, that depends a lot on your PC and your settings, but the short answer is: Not great, but not terrible, either, if you know what you’re doing. (Or whether you were able to access the game today, even!)
Before we go further, my PC specs are:
- GPU: RTX 3080
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
- 32GB RAM
- Monitor: 27” LG OLED @ 2560 x 1440
I run my Windows 11 OS on an NVMe drive and my games off of SSD drives. It’s a fast, capable machine that can run most everything that I throw at it, though I can’t get maximum settings and still get reasonable framerates.
My game automatically set my settings to Ultra with Nvidia DLSS set to Quality, but turned off all Ray-Tracing settings. It ran pretty smoothly at first, with just a bit of stuttering occasionally. I streamed and recorded and this hit my frames a bit but only in more action-packed scenes. So I turned on Ray-Tracing and the game ground to a halt. I was getting between 11 and 30 fps at any given moment, and bouncing around wildly. This continued even without streaming or recording gameplay.
Ultimately, to get a steady framerate and no stuttering I did two things: I turned down my graphical settings across the board to High and I turned Ray-Tracing back off. I kept DLSS on Quality. I plan to go back into settings and start ticking up some of the quality settings back to Ultra and testing this out, but for a quick and easy fix, these two steps helped enormously.
If you’re having performance issues on PC with Hogwarts Legacy, my first bit of advice is to turn off ray-tracing which you’ll find at the very bottom of the graphics settings. Along with this, try any of the following or some combination:
- Change DLSS (if you have it) to Performance or Ultra Performance
- Change all your graphical quality settings to one lower preset (Ultra to High, High to Medium etc.) You can go back later and tinker.
- Lower your resolution (from 4k to 2k, 2k to 1080p etc.) if your GPU is being overworked (this won’t really matter if your CPU is the issue, however).
- Run a benchmark like 3DMark to see what’s going on with your machine.
- Be sure to double-check the game’s minimum and recommended PC system requirements. Do you have enough RAM?
- Make sure your computer and drivers are all up-to-date, especially your graphics card driver.
Again, my fix was simple: Turning off ray-tracing and lowering from Ultra to High completely fixed virtually all the performance issues I was experiencing with the game. Yes, this sacrificed some graphical fidelity but who cares about pretty graphics if the game is barely running?
Your mileage may vary here, so you’ll need to use some trial and error. Hopefully the devs also issue some patches that help performance on PC, but as far as I can tell this isn’t really a buggy game so much as one that isn’t as optimized as it could be. And hopefully these tips help. Obviously, every PC is different and not everything will work for everyone, especially if your machine is simply too old to run Hogwarts Legacy.
Are you experiencing other issues? Do you have any tips on fixes, or questions on problems with the game? If so, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook.
Here’s Part 1 of my Hogwarts Legacy playthrough recorded on a PS5:
Further Reading:
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/02/07/hogwarts-legacy-pc-performance-issues-how-to-fix-framerate-drops-and-stuttering/