Hogwarts Legacy’s first patch hasn’t fixed performance issues for everyone
Players report that the stuttering continues.
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Hogwarts Legacy’sfirst major patch “addresses overall gameplay performance and stability,” but it hasn’t fixed everyone’s issues.
The February 14patch notesspecifically mention a number of bugs that cause the game to crash and “shader type compilation optimization.” It doesn’t, however, say that issueHL-14on the Warner Bros forums for fps drops has been fixed—one of the most (un)popular issues on the forum’s bug reporting section.
Since launch, Hogwarts Legacy PC players have reported stuttering and crashing while playing the game, and it seems to be caused by how it loads shaders. Unreal Engine games using DirectX12 have a tendency to chug when shaders load in for the first time, and it doesn’t matter how good of a gaming rig you have. Final Fantasy 7 Remake was a particularly egregious example of shader sin, and for some, Hogwarts Legacy is just as bad.
Players on the game’ssubreddit, Steamforums, and Warner Bros forums report that the patch hasn’t alleviated performance universally, and it might have even made it worse. “Hasn’t fixed one single thing,“Hot-Needleworker7827wrote. “Frames dropped by like 50% and stuttering increased around 500%, at least that’s how it feels. Bad job.”
“I played the game right before the ‘patch’ came out and then immediately afterwards,” Steam userHaikariwrote. “The difference is clearly noticeable. I never had lag issues in Hogsmeade on the level that this new patch has caused and flying is an absolute misery now while it used to be lovely.”
While these and other players are still reporting issues, the experience isn’t uniform across hardware configurations. I ran around the game’s open world after today’s patch and saw no noticeable changes. Hogwarts castle and the areas surrounding it run fairly smooth with intermittent stuttering on my Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. It runs basically the same as it did before once I manuallyupdatedthe game’s version of Nvidia’s DLSS frame rendering tech.
Several homemade performance fixes have been circulating since launch, but none of them have proved to be a silver bullet for all players. You can download theAscendio modor follow thisReddit tutorialat your own risk. If you aren’t comfortable with third-party tweaks, your best bet is to drop the graphics settings as low as you can stomach and wait for another patch.
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Below, find the full notes from today’s patch:
Bug fixes:
Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his speciality is in action RPGs and MMOs, he’s driven to cover all sorts of games whether they’re broken, beautiful, or bizarre.
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