An unofficial fix for performance issues plaguing Hogwarts Legacy has been posted online. Launched in a less-than-ideal state, the fix has been a boon to many fans' frustrations over Hogwarts Legacy's PC port.
Released on February 7 for fans who purchased the deluxe edition and February 10 for everyone else, Hogwarts Legacy has been a critical and commercial success. Reviews are largely positive, and the concurrent player count has far surpassed expectations. Following a February 9 streaming event, Hogwarts Legacy became the highest-watched single-player game of all time on Twitch, with 1.29 million people tuning in. Avalanche Software has, by all accounts, delivered on the dream game a generation of players who grew up with Harry Potter has always hoped would come to fruition. That is not to say the game is entirely free from problems, with myriad performance issues on the PC version of the game.
A post on Reddit has ailed many players' performance woes in the PC version of the game. With frame rates dipping into the single digits during certain sections of the game, the Reddit user outlined simple fixes requiring nothing beyond access to the Hogwarts Legacy's game files and a user's PC graphics card settings. The three-point fix entails first accessing the PC's GPU settings to turn on hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. Next, the player must navigate to Hogwarts Legacy's AppData and input a string of commands which the user was nice enough to type out for others to copy-paste into the Engine.ini file. Finally, for Nvidia users, the post recommends setting the shader cache size to 10GB in the global 3D settings of the graphics control panel. With those steps taken care of, players on PC who had struggled with performance should see a marked improvement in their game.
Comments on the Reddit post hail the fix as near-miraculous, with some users claiming to have tried many other posted fixes to no avail. The Reddit user's tips seem to repair a bottleneck in the game's GPU usage, enabling players to take full advantage of their PC's hardware and run Hogwarts Legacy seamlessly. With a repair so simple, it begs the question as to when an official hotfix containing the command string will release. For a game with so much to praise, it is a shame to have its legacy bogged down by easily-repaired technical issues.
Hogwarts Legacy is a visual spectacle that beautifully realizes a fantasy world fans of Harry Potter have wanted to explore for decades. Hopefully, these performance issues on the PC version of Hogwarts Legacy are ironed out quickly, letting the game be held in the esteem of its gameplay and design merits.
Hogwarts Legacy launched February 10 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, and will release April 4 for PS4 and Xbox One, and July 25 for Nintendo Switch.
