As we wrote yesterday, Hogwarts Legacy is a bear of a recreation to run. GeForce RTX 3080 playing cards battle 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 downside is the sport’s extremely inconsistent efficiency, although. Gamers who’ve tried the sport on PC will little question be conversant in weird gulfs in framerate and large stuttering at factors.
Earlier than we get began, be sure you test the minimal and really helpful system necessities. Hogwarts Legacy desires a robust 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—a minimum of, not with out appreciable person mods to uglify the sport. The really helpful 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.
In the meantime, 8 GB GPUs ought to in all probability follow “Excessive” for Texture High quality, and in the event you’ve obtained lower than that, you may wish to be on Medium and even Low. To make use of ray-tracing, you may want a GeForce RTX or Intel ARC graphics card, and possibly a minimum of an RTX 2060 SUPER or Arc A750 to attain something approaching playable efficiency. You are nearly actually going to have to make use of upscaling for no matter your regular decision can be. We battle to take care of 30 FPS in native 4K with Extremely ray-tracing on a GeForce RTX 4080.
After all, that is with all of those fixes utilized. With out 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 utterly resolve your entire efficiency issues in Hogwarts Legacy, however they will drastically enhance efficiency, a minimum of for some time. The sport appears to have some type of reminiscence leak, and efficiency positively degrades over time; you may in all probability wish to restart it each couple of hours.
With all of that out of the best way, let’s get to the tweaks. There are two predominant tweaks for Hogwarts Legacy: a Home windows Exploit Safety change, and a few INI file modifications. The Exploit Safety change is simple; simply carry out a Begin seek for “exploit safety”, and within the dialog that pops up, you wish to head over to “Program Settings”, add a program, and level it to HogwartsLegacy.exe. You may simply use the filename.
As soon as you have finished that, scroll right down to Management Stream Guard (CFG), test “Override system settings”, after which flip it off. You too can disable CFG globally if you’d like, however we do not advocate that. Click on Apply, after which shut the window; you are finished with this tweak. This tweak does barely cut back your system’s safety when you’re taking part in Hogwarts Legacy, nevertheless 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 will have to have run the sport a minimum of as soon as, after which browse to “%localappdatapercentHogwarts LegacySavedConfigWindowsNoEditor”. (You may paste that string into the Run dialog, together with the quotes, to open the folder.) As soon as there, discover the Engine.ini file, open it, and on the backside, add a clean line comply with by these traces:
[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]
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
For the PoolSize worth, the default worth is one half of your video RAM, in megabytes. You are able to do the maths: take your video RAM quantity in gigabytes, divide by two, multiply by 1024. Nevertheless, some customers advocate utilizing decrease settings, like 3072 or 2048. It is potential that the primary profit from these configuration settings is decreasing the video RAM pool accessible to the feel streaming engine. You may anticipate 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 effectively value 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 most important 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. Nevertheless, some customers have reported that neither of those two tweaks did something for them in any respect.
One remaining observe we wish to make regards NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 Body Technology expertise. It is really enabled by default on methods that assist 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. Nevertheless, DLSS 3 FG stays enabled, regardless of being greyed-out. To disable it, you need to allow DLSS upscaling. You may as soon as once more disable upscaling after, in the event you select.
Finally, Hogwarts Legacy is a recreation that’s desperately in want of optimization efforts, and game-focused driver optimizations from AMD and NVIDIA could not harm 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, nevertheless it’s removed from flawless.
Fortuitously for Avalanche Software program and Portkey Video games, the sport itself is definitely improbable. Even when you have completely no love for the Wizarding World or the Harry Potter sequence, when you have any love for Victorian fantasy in any respect, it is a good time. After all, in the event you do have love for the setting, you are in all probability already taking part in it.
If you happen to attempt these tweaks, tell us the way you come out. Likewise, in the event you’re already taking part in with no issues, we wish to hear about that too. Publish your ideas within the feedback beneath.
