The big game Hogwarts Legacy will be launched on Friday, but already on Tuesday evening those who have pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition could start exploring the corridors at Hogwarts.
Gamer.no had initially planned a larger, technical analysis of the game on PC, but I am throwing out a shorter article now as a small warning.
It may be wise to skip the Deluxe Edition. So far, only Intel has come up with video card drivers for the game, and the “day 1” update will only come on Friday.
The performance is therefore not all that great. Not everyone notices this, but there are enough of them that you should apply a little extra patience, no matter how much you are looking forward to it.
I’ll be back with a new article about the PC version of Hogwarts Legacy after the update this weekend.
Startup trouble
We have already published a first impression of Hogwarts Legacy where we mention some technical problems on console.
After a few hours on the PC, it is obvious that the game needs a little polishing. The PC version has a decent menu, and you get, among other things, the option to adjust the viewing angle, unlock the frame rate and change the properties of all the buttons, but there is a lot that rattles.
For example, I have not been able to run the game in full screen. This may be a problem for me, but a bit of Googling shows that several people struggle with the same thing.
The biggest problem, however, is the performance. I have played through the tutorial part of the game with an RTX 4090, and regularly experience strong drops in the image flow.
This applies both with and without ray tracing on, and the problem gets bigger when you get to explore outside of Hogwarts.
The testing above was done in Galtvang, and it is the drop in frame rate that affects the quality of the experience the most.
The throughput is decent enough with Nvidia’s flagship, but I have not yet tested with weaker video cards. Performance will probably increase significantly on Friday anyway.
You should therefore skip pre-ordering. In any case, the Deluxe Edition does not provide anything other than a couple of cosmetic items that you have little use for.
Big variations
There is no doubt that the developers have put their heart and soul into recreating Hogwarts. The world building is what has impressed the undersigned the most from the start, and both the school, the surrounding environment, the magic and the characters are visually striking.
But there are also some start-up difficulties here. Every now and then I find that figures and objects appear and disappear out of nowhere. It’s almost magical.
Some figures have impressive facial expressions and animations, others it almost seems as if the developers have forgotten.
Wandering around the castle evokes many memories from childhood. And this is where the main strength of the game lies so far for me.
Mikkjell Lønning/Gamer.no
The frame rate varies greatly whether one is outside or inside, and the implementation of ray tracing, which consumes a lot of computing power, makes so little difference that there is no point in using it.
Crashing
There are millions of hardware configurations on a PC, and it is – as always – that some report crashes.
On social media such as reddit, users write about crashes both during gameplay, after the first film sequence and right from the start.
Some report that it has been helpful to turn down the setting level on the graphics menu, others have been helped by turning off automatic overclocking of their video cards.
Increasing the virtual memory on the computer is also pointed to as a solution.
Most of this will probably be rectified by the developer in due course.
As mentioned, Gamer.no will return with a new version of this article shortly. There is not much point in going very deep into the PC version until the worst problems have been corrected.
