Hogwarts Legacy’s system specs seem pretty reasonable for what’s on offer
A GTX 1070 and five year-old i5 will net you 1080p 60fps at low settings.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Alongside its big preview at Gamescom,Hogwarts Legacy’s Steam pagehas been updated to include its suggested system requirements. While our peers atGamesRadarare right to wonder how this thing will ever run on Nintendo Switch, its PC requirements strike me as pretty reasonable for a big budget, open world RPG.
Hogwarts Legacy minimum requirements (1080p, 60fps, low settings)
Hogwarts Legacy recommended requirements (1080p, 60fps, high settings)
I initially had a bit of sticker shock at the GTX 1070 as a minimum graphics choice, the same as Elden Ring’s suggested minimum, but that’s not really fair. The 1070’s over six years old now, quite long in the tooth for a mid-high tier card. The fact that it will apparently push 1080p resolution and 60fps performance in a 2023 AAA release is actually pretty stunning.
“Minimum” performance has come a long way since the horrendous, Games For Windows Live, 720p/30fps-locked Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition port. Thrifty gamers out there might be able to squeeze more resolution/frame rate-compromised experiences out of Legacy with even older hardware.
The game’s performance seems like it’ll be helped along by image reconstruction tech—the “Upscale Quality/Performance Setting” mentioned in the requirements. It seems to be Avalanche’s own solution or AMD’s FSR, as Nvidia DLSS would not work with the older GTX and Radeon cards in these specs.
I’m a bit puzzled by the proverbial half-step up for the game’s recommended settings—1080p, 60fps with High settings on a similarly withered i7-8700/GTX 1080 Ti combo. This space might have been better used to suggest hardware for higher resolutions, but this is a decent enough start and a strictly theoretical conversation for the time being. We’ll have to wait until February 10 to see how Hogwarts Legacy actually performs.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister’s copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he’s not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.
Amazon’s Mass Effect TV show now in ‘active development’ from the writer of F9: The Fast Saga (the one where a car goes to space)
Take-Two CEO says Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track for ‘fall’ next year, GTA 5 has sold over 205 million, and ‘PC will be more and more a part of [our] business going forward’
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
