For all the controversy surrounding the release of “Hogwarts LegacyIt’s almost remarkable how well the game is currently doing with critics and gamers: on the ratings portal Metacritic.com There is not only a very good critical rating 85 out of 100 pointsbut also a great user result 9.1 out of 10 possible points Open world game in the world of “Hogwarts”. And in our testing, we also witnessed the developers of Avalanche surprisingly apply the magic of the “Potter” world to a role-playing game, full of atmosphere, likable details, and great discoveries. But not everything is “just” charming in the world of “Hogwarts Legacy”: even before the release, many players complained about too many stuttering and strong frame rate fluctuations in the PC version. We were able to confirm that as well, but we wanted to take a look at the day one patch to give you an impression of the PC version.
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What we found and what we hope will improve in the near future, you can read about in the next few sections.
Hogwarts Legacy: Performance and Graphic Impressions
From beginning to taking your first steps at the School of Wizardry into a huge open world on the borders of Hogwarts: “Hogwarts LegacyBrings countless iconic locations of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe to life with lots of detail and some really beautiful graphics. Avalanche has used the Unreal Engine 4 to implement ‘Hogwarts’ & Co. as faithfully as possible. Although not all textures and environmental details appear in First League, however, “Hogwarts Legacy” overall made a good impression with 4K graphics, ultra settings and ray tracing turned on.
But of course, graphical luxury has a price, too: activated ray tracing settings in particular suck a lot of performance even on high-end PCs or RTX laptops. We were able to play the game on a brand new Razer Blade 16, among other things RTX 4090 Max-Q (160-175W TDP), i9-13950HX, 32GB DDR5-5600 RAM Tests. Bei einem Lauf durch „Hogsmeade“ wurde deutlich, das selbst mit einem absoluten High-End-Laptop 4K with 60 FPS nur mithilfe von DLSS 2 bzw. DLSS 3 erreicht werden kann: Ohne eingeschalteten Raytracing kamen wir mit DLSS 2 Balanced auf knapp 74 FPS on average. With DLSS 3 or “Building Frames” our frame rate nearly doubled to 142fps.
With ray tracing, the effect of DLSS 3 becomes almost more significant: with DLSS 2 Balanced, we achieved just 48fps with 4K Ultra and ray tracing. With DLSS 3, there was a significant performance boost of 56%, which ultimately allowed us to enjoy the game at 74fps, 4K, Ultra, and ray tracing. Window Generation or DLSS 3 is currently only available for 1940s generation Nvidia cards. However, activating it increases latency somewhat, but this is not as significant in “Hogwarts Legacy”.
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Hogwarts Legacy: Stutters and technical problems cloud the overall impression
Während die eigentliche performance in etwa dem entspricht, was man von einem massiven und modernen Open-World-Titel aktuell wohl erwarten kann, reiht sich „Hogwarts Legacy” in eine Reihe von aktuellen Titeln an, die massive Probleme mit Rucklern und der Kompilierung von Shadern to have. Even the excellent “Dead Space” and “Forspoken” edition has had to struggle lately with stuttering. Hogwarts Legacy also repeatedly suffers from severe stuttering, which we noticed on two high-end test machines (Razer Blade 16 + Desktop PC with Ryzen 7600x and Nvidia RTX 4080).
Unfortunately, it’s hard to narrow down the issues: some players report nearly flawless gaming experiences, while others almost despair due to the numerous (subtle) stutters, small bugs, and freezes. In fact, Reddit and Steam have now created their own threads where users can offer help on how to improve game performance: in addition to manually adapting the existing DLSS driver, custom engine files are available for download. According to the guides, affected players should try to disable the unrealistic Smooth Frame Rate feature or enable asynchronous computation. If you have a lot of VRAM, you can also manually disable texture streaming to reduce potential stuttering.
However, we hope Avalance and WB Games will address these issues as soon as possible. Because otherwise, the game is actually a very worthy adaptation of “Wizarding World”, which only causes a lot of controversy with side effects about author JK Rowling.
Disclaimer: Although several developers have worked on “Hogwarts Legacy” and the game is not directly based on a novel, JK Rowling as author of the Harry Potter books continues to benefit from income, among other things. This person who in the past often denied entire groups of people the right to exist and stirred up hatred against trans people. A recommended read on the subject is this article by colleagues at GameSpot, the last sentence summing up many fans’ dilemma: “Supporting ‘Hogwarts Legacy,’ a game in which fanatics of magical fantasy are fought, is not wrong. But it would be to ignore his legacy of true fanaticism.” However, it is advised to watch YouTube user Lilischote’s touching video, which you can find here.
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