Hotly-anticipated, open-world RPG Hogwarts Legacy formally launched yesterday, and I spent most of final evening testing the sport on a couple of totally different video playing cards. The conclusion? Hogwarts Legacy is a reasonably sport with so much to love, but it surely runs about as properly as Hogwarts’ jovial mendicant monk.
We’d like to current you an in depth article stuffed with graphs and charts, and which will but come sooner or later, however the greatest drawback we encountered when attempting to benchmark the sport is deciding the place and the way to take action, as there isn’t any built-in benchmark utility. The problem is that the sport’s efficiency is wildly variable and inconsistent, not solely from scene to scene, however even inside a scene. Take a take a look at this frame-time graph.
That would not look so dangerous, does it? A bit spiky at instances, however total the frame-rate hovers round 50 FPS, which is eminently playable. That’s utilizing a GeForce RTX 3080 at a 2560×1440 decision with out upscaling, and the sport set to “Ultra” settings with ray-tracing enabled. Quite acceptable, if very demanding. Now, check out this graph:
That one most likely would not look so dangerous, both, till you take a look at the dimensions on the left-hand aspect. That’s proper: that is a mean framerate of about 6 FPS, discounting the relatively-speedy part on the finish that is working at round 25 FPS. This seize was taken only a few tens of meters down the street from the check above, on the identical time of day, on the identical settings, on the identical {hardware}.
The entire sport is like this. Traversing the world, you’ll abruptly discover your {smooth} gameplay interrupted by intervals of unbelievably gradual and stuttery efficiency. Framerates dip (presumably on account of loading) if you enter a brand new space, understandably, but it surely can also occur for no obvious motive in any respect. Opening your menu could cause framerates to rise, however then closing it might probably make issues even worse than earlier than.
Lest you suppose sooner {hardware} is the reply, here is one other seize for you:
This is similar system, now with a GeForce RTX 4080. The temporary dip in frame-times there—correlated to an increase in frame-rate to round 25 FPS—took place after practically a minute of jogging round at a smooth-as-shattered-glass seven frames per second, and as you possibly can see, it did not stick round.
This is not a CPU limitation problem; each entire CPU utilization and per-thread utilization remained fairly low. GPU utilization was on the ceiling all the time. It is not a video RAM limitation, both; whereas the sport likes to allocate all the obtainable video reminiscence for itself, the instruments that now we have did not point out it was ever utilizing greater than 15GB of our GeForce RTX 4080’s 16GB.
We have mapped out a couple of areas which are identified to supply poor efficiency constantly, and some areas that usually run reasonably-well. However, generally these aren’t even dependable. The graph above is from a run via of one among our “smooth-performing” areas. While jogging down the Hogwarts hall, the framerate abruptly tanked, with efficiency falling as little as 3 FPS.
Here’s what a standard jog via that hall appears like. Note that this type of efficiency is simply obtainable as soon as you’ve got handed via an space the primary time; regardless of that the sport performs a prolonged shader compilation step each time you launch it, it nonetheless appears to have important shader compilation stuttering struggles, as new areas are at all times gradual.
We’ve additionally noticed important texture corruption on each GPU we have examined it on. It’s not notably frequent, with one exception—utilizing ray-tracing on Radeons breaks most clear objects, particularly timber—but it surely occurs for unknown causes. We’re utilizing an open-air check bench, so temperatures are low as you’d anticipate.
Overall, whereas we’re fairly taken with Hogwarts Legacy as a online game, it may be an actual ache to play on the PC. You can disable ray-tracing for improved efficiency, and you should use upscaling (through DLSS 2, FSR 1 or 2, and even Intel’s XeSS) to lighten the load in your GPU, however nothing we have tried will truly make the sport run with any diploma of constant smoothness — but.
