Hogwarts Legacy Discussion

[ZedClampet]

If no one else plays it, I'll just talk to myself, which will be nothing new.

No Spoilers please. Just write general impressions, etc.

Game is hard on the old PC, but then again I have everything on Ultra and all ray tracing options are full steam ahead. DLSS is on "Quality", but that might get changed soon enough. Game was running between 55 and 60 fps, but there was one cutscene right after I arrived at the school that was under 20 consistently. But I'm on a laptop.. Your desktop will likely fair better.

GPU 3070ti (155 TGP)
CPU 12700H
RAM 16 GB (this seems to be a problem)
NVMe disk
Monitor 1440p

By the way, at the beginning of the setup, it asks the standard thing where you have to make something barely visible, which I did, but the rest of the game was way too bright, sort of washed out, so I just went back and left it at the default. Hopefully I'll be able to see in darker areas.

I just tried changing DLSS to Balanced, but it didn't impact my FPS at all. I suppose the game thinks 55 to 60 is good enough, maybe. Not sure how that works, exactly. I put it on 'Ultra Performance' and the fps only went up to the upper 60's, but then the game looked not so good, so it's back to Quality for me.

Changing the graphics presets from Ultra to anything else doesn't change my FPS (and I'm not CPU bound), so it probably requires a restart. I'm not that dedicated, so I'll never know....

 

[Brian Boru]

for what it's worth

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knw74E-gMio

 

[Kborom]

I'll be in at some point, but initial reports of bugs and stuff is putting me off from jumping in too quickly. Very interested in early game thoughts though.

 

[ZedClampet]

I'll be in at some point, but initial reports of bugs and stuff is putting me off from jumping in too quickly. Very interested in early game thoughts though.

I'm about an hour in. I haven't experienced any bugs, but the performance on my PC isn't great. However, I didn't have the latest Nvidia driver because I couldn't get GeForce Experience to work (which I suspect is because of so many people trying to update for the game). I finally just downloaded the driver from their site and installed it. I'm going to test the game again and maybe play with the settings a little to see if I can improve things. Also, I assume there will be a day one patch whenever the game actually launches.

 

[Alm]

Today is the official release day iirc.

I bought it on Xbox, and am up to level 16ish. I think that's about 6hrs in.

I think the game is probably better optimised on consoles. I'm not sure why the PC version is so resource heavy.

I like it so far but I'm not so enchanted by it that I'm going to sit down and complete it in one hit.

 

[ZedClampet]

As expected the Nvidia drivers helped stabilize things a bit. Also, even though it doesn't tell you all the time, if you want to change your ray tracing options, you have to restart your system before they go into effect. I've got shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion all on, but I moved them from Ultra to Medium, and now I'm comfortably in the 60 to 70 fps zone, and, just being honest, I can't tell a difference in how it looks. Maybe if I saw a side by side comparison, I would notice, but the game still looks great.

So if you aren't getting acceptable framerates, my first suggestion would be to lower the quality of the ray tracing. By the way, turning it off completely got me to 90 fps.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Hardware Unboxed did a pretty extensive performance review. Saw this posted elsewhere, thought it might be of interest.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxpqJIO_9gQ&t=1085s

Looks like VRAM is a pretty major issue with RT on less than 12GB of VRAM. Not sure if the day one patch helps with any of that. But the 3060 is ahead of the 10GB 3080 here.

 

[ZedClampet]

Hardware Unboxed did a pretty extensive performance review. Saw this posted elsewhere, thought it might be of interest.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxpqJIO_9gQ&t=1085s

Looks like VRAM is a pretty major issue with RT on less than 12GB of VRAM. Not sure if the day one patch helps with any of that. But the 3060 is ahead of the 10GB 3080 here.

They are getting worse than I am considering I'm at 1440p. If I remembered what my email and password were for YouTube, I'd upload a video. But I have mostly just been inside the school after the opening scenes. Now the sorting ceremony, when I was on Ultra everything, was genuinely terrible, but just walking around the school I was in the mid 50's, though occasionally it would flash down into the upper 40's. I guess if I took an average and included the sorting ceremony that I would be around where they are, but still at a higher resolution.

Of course, I also have every unnecessary process on my computer turned off when I play. HP gives you a handy tool to either turn them off one by one or as a whole. The nice thing about it compared to using task manager is that they know which things don't need to be open, whereas a lot of those processes I have to look up.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Benchmark reviewers generally look for the more demanding places that they can also get a consistent run, as far as I know. The good places will generally give you an average of a few runs too. HUB has been one of the better ones.

Better they give worse results than most people get than have people all over the comments complaining their performance is way worse and they bought the game expecting to get the same as the video. It still serves as a comparison between cards.

Just noticed though, this video went up 9 hours ago and they tested over 20 GPU's across 3 resolutions with several quality settings. Definitely before any patches were applied, possibly on older drivers too.

 

[ZedClampet]

Benchmark reviewers generally look for the more demanding places that they can also get a consistent run, as far as I know. The good places will generally give you an average of a few runs too. HUB has been one of the better ones.

Better they give worse results than most people get than have people all over the comments complaining their performance is way worse and they bought the game expecting to get the same as the video. It still serves as a comparison between cards.

Just noticed though, this video went up 9 hours ago and they tested over 20 GPU's across 3 resolutions with several quality settings. Definitely before any patches were applied, possibly on older drivers too.

After thinking about it some more, I think that what I need is to get an app that gives me an average FPS. I bet my averages are lower than I think.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Could be, I just saw you mentioned about RT off and it reminded me of this I saw earlier. Enjoy your Quidditch, or whatever

 

[ZedClampet]

Could be, I just saw you mentioned about RT off and it reminded me of this I saw earlier. Enjoy your Quidditch, or whatever

The Quidditch season was canceled due to student injuries.

The game is kind of a cross between melee and shooter so far, but I've only made it to one combat. I guess it's more of a shooter, but the defensive moves remind me of a melee game.

Speaking of quidditch. Seems like a missed opportunity to put some PvP into your game. You could have had the SP game and then a Quidditch add-on, kind of like with Halo.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Kaamos_Llama You don't have the game and you don't care, but I tagged you anyway haha

This is what I got with everything on Ultra. However:
1) I just ran in circles around the commons for a couple of minutes. It's not a demanding area.
2) I overclocked my GPU while I was trying to get Afterburner to do a benchmark, which never quite worked out, so I used the Xbox app. But the important thing is that my GPU is overclocked.

I made the important bits larger so they could be easier seen. Obviously I stopped running in circles to take the screenshot.

The GPU never gets hot, and I'm not even sure overclocking works exactly right since the TGP stays at 155. My knowledge on overclocking is poor.

 

[Alm]

Review just dropped on PCG:

https://www.pcgamer.com/hogwarts-legacy-review/

An 83. I think I would give it about that, maybe an 80.

 

[Brian Boru]

Quidditch add-on

Cue first DLC…

HP gives you a handy tool

Oh that's good! So good I started a thread

 

[Zloth]

Comments on the review aren't closed, but they haven't let a post be added in 17 hours.

I've got a question - the article mentions that the game was slowing down without the CPU or GPU showing much usage, and it was thought that the shader compiler might be taking up time. What actually does the compiling?? I would assume it would be the GPU or CPU, or maybe both working together, but then wouldn't shader compiling count as usage?

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

@Kaamos_Llama You don't have the game and you don't care, but I tagged you anyway haha

This is what I got with everything on Ultra. However:
1) I just ran in circles around the commons for a couple of minutes. It's not a demanding area.
2) I overclocked my GPU while I was trying to get Afterburner to do a benchmark, which never quite worked out, so I used the Xbox app. But the important thing is that my GPU is overclocked.

I made the important bits larger so they could be easier seen. Obviously I stopped running in circles to take the screenshot.

The GPU never gets hot, and I'm not even sure overclocking works exactly right since the TGP stays at 155. My knowledge on overclocking is poor.

You'd have to monitor the clockspeed live to see if it was actually overclocked. I assume it isn't really because adding clockspeed increases the current draw. So unless the voltage is dropping somehow while achieving a higher clockspeed then power draw would be higher than before.

I'd imagine laptops have a hard limit in the BIOS for TGP you'd have to get around somehow as well.

 

[ZedClampet]

You'd have to monitor the clockspeed live to see if it was actually overclocked. I assume it isn't really because adding clockspeed increases the current draw. So unless the voltage is dropping somehow while achieving a higher clockspeed then power draw would be higher than before.

I'd imagine laptops have a hard limit in the BIOS for TGP you'd have to get around somehow as well.

Yeah, that's kind of what I figured. There's only so much power in a laptop, and if the TGP weren't set in stone, you'd probably have all sorts of problems.

 

[Pifanjr]

I assume Quidditch will be be added in a DLC at some point, I'm pretty sure most people who bought the game would immediately buy that DLC as well.

 

[ZedClampet]

You'd have to monitor the clockspeed live to see if it was actually overclocked. I assume it isn't really because adding clockspeed increases the current draw. So unless the voltage is dropping somehow while achieving a higher clockspeed then power draw would be higher than before.

I'd imagine laptops have a hard limit in the BIOS for TGP you'd have to get around somehow as well.

Ha, as soon as I left that room and went outside, my fps dropped into the 20s. I didn't go anywhere else last night because it wouldn't let me until I finished a quest. I just turned ray tracing completely off and am done playing with it unless my frames drop again. With a 17 inch screen, I could always drop to 1080p without noticing with my vision.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

RT is so brutal on everything, theyre going to have to either improve the tech or the software somehow. It kills performance in every game its in and I dont really think it looks that much better from what I've seen.

 

[DXCHASE]

RT is so brutal on everything, theyre going to have to either improve the tech or the software somehow. It kills performance in every game its in and I dont really think it looks that much better from what I've seen.

Some of the older games with RT really look nice considering that with somethin like a 3070ti, im getting over 100fps w/RT ultra settings on games as old (4-6 years id say) as Anthem, Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc. even at 4k (which i dont play in) but i think RT is different now than its first iterations.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Some of the older games with RT really look nice considering that with somethin like a 3070ti, im getting over 100fps w/RT ultra settings on games as old (4-6 years id say) as Anthem, Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc. even at 4k (which i dont play in) but i think RT is different now than its first iterations.

I've been interested to get a card and try it for myself, but I really like playing action games with at least 60 FPS these days and if I'm turning on RT to max for the visuals I don't want to be lowering other settings to keep it up there.

Seems the games people say have the better looking RT like Control or Cyberpunk are still a struggle to get that sort of FPS with even with the top cards at 1440p with max settings. Maybe I just havent followed it closely enough.

Whatever my next card is at this point hopefully I'll be able to play something I want to with it maxed out at decent frame rates. Maybe DLSS/FSR is just the future for all that. I'm having to use FSR in Dead Space and it still looks pretty good.

 

[mainer]

Some of the older games with RT really look nice considering that with somethin like a 3070ti, im getting over 100fps w/RT ultra settings on games as old (4-6 years id say) as Anthem, Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc. even at 4k (which i dont play in) but i think RT is different now than its first iterations.

Just from my single experience with RT in an older game, The Witcher 3 Next-Gen, I have to agree that it makes a huge difference in reflections and shadow detail. Amazing so for an old game. I'm using a 3080 and a 60hz 4k monitor, and while there is a significant performance hit at times, to me it's within an acceptable range of FPS for the graphic detail.

but I really like playing action games with at least 60 FPS these days and if I'm turning on RT to max for the visuals I don't want to be lowering other settings to keep it up there.

It comes down to what each individual player finds acceptable in terms of FPS vs RT effects and graphic detail. For me, running at a variable FPS of 35-50 (with occasional dips below 30) is a fair exchange for the vivid details. Others may not be able to accept anything below 60 FPS for any reason. There is no right or wrong here, it's just the priorities of each player. Performance is also going to be affected as to how well the developer implemented RT features, especially when adding it to older games, as opposed to building it in from the beginning with a new game.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

@mainer Youre right it is subjective and depends a lot on the type of game we are talking about as well. If I'm moving and shooting stuff frame rates below 60 are very noticeable now I've experienced faster. Not too long ago you could upgrade GPU and go back and play 2-3 year old games maxed out at and buttery smooth, seems with the addition of RT you might have to go back 5-6 years in some cases now to do that.

Maybe theyll figure it out eventually, or it will be superceded by in-engine stuff that doesnt have so much performance cost like Lumen in Unreal 5. Or maybe DLSS/FSR or Nvidia frame injection will all be necessary going forwards for people who want to keep frame rates up.

Have you tried DLSS or any of that jazz in Witcher or elsewhere? Interested to know how you feel about it as someone who leans towards fidelity rather than performance.