Hogwarts Legacy allows you to explore the world of Harry Potter in stunning detail for the first time. But to make that journey truly beautiful you not only need the best graphical settings, but also smooth performance.
A fair number of places in Hogwarts Legacy are demanding on your GPU, particularly when there are a lot of beasts on screen at once. This means it can be hard to keep a stable FPS if you are on the highest graphical settings.
Here are the settings we recommend if you are playing Hogwarts Legacy on PC.
Hogwarts Legacy: Our PC
Here are the specs of the PC we used so you can compare it to your own.
- CPU: 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900KF
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- RAM: 32GB of Kingston HyperX Fury RGB DDR4, 3,200MHz
- Motherboard: MSI MPG Z490 GAMING EDGE WIFI
- OS: Windows 10, 64-bit
When we booted up Hogwarts Legacy it recommended everything was set to Ultra, but with ray tracing turns off. This gave us stable fps during cutscenes and the majority of gameplay, though we noticed drops when a lot of things were on screen.
This is something that every PC seems to have in common, so let’s work on stabilizing this situation.
Hogwarts Legacy: Where to start with you PC settings
If you are unsure about what your system is capable of, you should start by clicking ‘Run Benchmark’ from the settings menu. This will give the recommended settings for your hardware. These settings can then be used as a baseline for adjustments. If you then want to better stabilize your fps, you can downgrade certain graphical options.
Hogwarts Legacy: Optimal fps options on PC
We found that consistent fps could be gained by reducing the quality of the following settings. The higher we have listed the option, the greater impact it will have.
- Ray Tracing (Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, Reflections)
- View Distance Quality
- Texture Quality
- Effect Quality
- Fog Quality
- Shadow Quality
- Post Process Quality
- Material Quality
- Foliage Quality
Even if you lower all these settings you will likely never stabilize the fps completely in very busy areas. However, it will help with the consistency, while smoothing out the overall visuals.
Ray tracing in particular heavily reduces performance, and it doesn’t make a big impact on the graphics of Hogwarts Legacy. We actually recommend turning the ray tracing off, even if you’re not looking to optimize your performance.
While it can be important to see as far as possible, the view distance quality has a large impact on frame rate, and will need to be reduced if you are having issues. However, reducing texture quality and fog quality will see little visual change for big improvements in fps.
Shadow quality, material quality, and foliage quality will heavily reduce the visuals, while not offering much performance improvement in return. These should be the last settings you’re looking to reduce.
It might also be worth capping your fps at 60 if you’re struggling, instead of using the uncapped mode. You can also use upscaling like NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR which are available in Hogwarts Legacy to help to boost your fps without having a negative impact on your visual experience.
Written by Marco Wutz and Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
