As we wrote yesterday, Hogwarts Legacy is a bear of a recreation to run. GeForce RTX 3080 playing cards wrestle in 2560×1440, even with DLSS enabled, and Radeon playing cards cannot run the sport playably in any respect with ray-tracing turned on. Arguably the true drawback is the sport’s extremely inconsistent efficiency, although. Players who’ve tried the sport on PC will little doubt be conversant in weird gulfs in framerate and large stuttering at factors.
Before we get began, ensure you verify the minimal and really useful system necessities. Hogwarts Legacy needs a strong PC, and triply so if you wish to attempt ray-tracing. Tablets, transportable PCs, and something however the very newest skinny & mild laptops needn’t apply—no less than, not with out appreciable person mods to uglify the sport. The really useful specs strongly encourage you to place the sport on an SSD, and we noticed small however noticeable load time variations between SATA and NVMe SSDs in our testing.
Meanwhile, 8 GB GPUs ought to most likely keep on with “High” for Texture Quality, and in the event you’ve obtained lower than that, you will need to be on Medium and even Low. To use ray-tracing, you will want a GeForce RTX or Intel ARC graphics card, and doubtless no less than an RTX 2060 SUPER or Arc A750 to realize something approaching playable efficiency. You’re nearly actually going to have to make use of upscaling for no matter your common decision can be. We wrestle to take care of 30 FPS in native 4K with Ultra ray-tracing on a GeForce RTX 4080.
Of course, that is with all of those fixes utilized. Without the fixes in place, the sport barely runs in any respect with ray-tracing enabled, as we demonstrated yesterday. To be clear, these fixes are not going to fully resolve all your efficiency issues in Hogwarts Legacy, however they’ll drastically enhance efficiency, no less than for some time. The recreation appears to have some sort of reminiscence leak, and efficiency undoubtedly degrades over time; you will most likely need to restart it each couple of hours.
With all of that out of the way in which, let’s get to the tweaks. There are two fundamental tweaks for Hogwarts Legacy: a Windows Exploit Protection change, and a few INI file modifications. The Exploit Protection change is simple; simply carry out a Start seek for “exploit safety”, and within the dialog that pops up, you need to head over to “Program Settings”, add a program, and level it to HogwartsLegacy.exe. You can simply use the filename.
Once you’ve got executed that, scroll right down to Control Flow Guard (CFG), verify “Override system settings”, after which flip it off. You can even disable CFG globally if you need, however we do not advocate that. Click Apply, after which shut the window; you are executed with this tweak. This tweak does barely scale back your system’s safety when you’re taking part in Hogwarts Legacy, however it’s a reasonably small threat contemplating that this isn’t a web based recreation.
The INI file modification is a bit more concerned. You’ll have to have run the sport no less than as soon as, after which browse to “%localappdata%Hogwarts LegacySavedConfigWindowsNoEditor”. (You can paste that string into the Run dialog, together with the quotes, to open the folder.) Once there, discover the Engine.ini file, open it, and on the backside, add a clean line observe by these strains:
[SystemSettings]
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=True
r.GTSyncType=1
r.MaxAnisotropy=8
r.OneFrameThreadLag=1
r.FinishCurrentFrame=0
r.TextureStreaming=1
r.OnlyStreamInTextures=True
r.Streaming.PoolSize=<SEE BELOW FOR VALUE>
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1[ConsoleVariables]
PermitAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
PermitAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
For the PoolSize worth, the default worth is one half of your video RAM, in megabytes. You can do the mathematics: take your video RAM quantity in gigabytes, divide by two, multiply by 1024. However, some customers advocate utilizing decrease settings, like 3072 or 2048. It’s potential that the primary profit from these configuration settings is decreasing the video RAM pool obtainable to the feel streaming engine. You can count on that these aggressive texture streaming settings will trigger further texture pop-in, most notably whenever you first load into the sport, however we discovered the trade-off in smoothness to be very properly price it.
With each of those tweaks in place, we discovered efficiency improved tremendously on a GeForce RTX 4080, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3060, and on a Radeon RX 6800 XT. The greatest enchancment was on the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which might barely run the sport in any respect earlier than the tweaks, however comes out smelling like roses afterward. However, some customers have reported that neither of those two tweaks did something for them in any respect.
One ultimate be aware we need to make regards NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 Frame Generation know-how. It’s really enabled by default on methods that help it, and there is a complicated high quality to the UI the place in the event you disable DLSS upscaling, you additionally disable the power to toggle DLSS 3 FG. However, DLSS 3 FG stays enabled, regardless of being greyed-out. To disable it, you need to allow DLSS upscaling. You can as soon as once more disable upscaling after, in the event you select.
Ultimately, Hogwarts Legacy is a recreation that’s desperately in want of optimization efforts, and game-focused driver optimizations from AMD and NVIDIA could not damage both. We would not blame anybody for ready on a patch earlier than making a purchase order at this level. With the tweaks above and a few dialed-in settings, the sport is eminently playable, however it’s removed from flawless.
Fortunately for Avalanche Software and Portkey Games, the sport itself is definitely improbable. Even in case you have completely no love for the Wizarding World or the Harry Potter sequence, in case you have any love for Victorian fantasy in any respect, it is a good time. Of course, in the event you do have love for the setting, you are most likely already taking part in it.
If you attempt these tweaks, tell us the way you come out. Likewise, in the event you’re already taking part in with no issues, we need to hear about that too. Post your ideas within the feedback under.
