How to fix Hogwarts Legacy frame drops & stuttering on PC

It’s known that there are substantial compatibility issues that can affect performance if you have an AMD Ryzen Zen 4 CPU.

If you do have one of these, this could be the source of your problems. Check out our dedicated page for more information (Hogwarts Legacy isn’t using your Ryzen CPU properly).

Ray-Tracing is generally a very demanding setting, that even people with high-end gaming PCs will often turn off so they get an overall smoother experience.

This graphical technology generates realistic more simulations of light, though it’s an incredibly intensive procedure.

Your PC might not even have Ray-Tracing support to begin with (you can read about the best GPUs for ray-tracing here) but if it does, disabling the feature should give you a decent performance boost, reducing frame drops.

You can read more about how to turn off ray tracing in Hogwarts Legacy here.

DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI-based tech that renders frames at lower resolutions then upscales them to 1080p, 1440p, 4K, or whatever resolution, essentially artificially shortcutting the rendering process and either improving FPS performance at your existing resolution, or letting you increase the resolution and graphical fidelity to settings that would previously be unplayable with your particular graphics card.

Insofar as Hogwarts Legacy goes, turning it on to Ultra Performance mode will maximise the FPS, helping to reduce frame drops, stuttering and the demands on your hardware that could lead to crashes.

This is admittedly isn’t much of an earth-shattering insight, but at least it’s straightforward.

Ultimately until the developers sort out whatever issues are hampering performance with the game in a patch, you might have to settle to enjoying the game at a lower resolution and/or rendering quality than you’d like.

Generally reducing shadow quality is a good place to start, as these are demanding but you’ll probably miss them less than reducing the other quality settings.

Neither Nvidia or AMD have yet released official drivers with support for Hogwarts Legacy, though Intel have for their Arc series.

For when they do release though, ensuring that you’re updated to the latest graphics card drivers is always a good way to make sure that your hardware is fully compatible with the game, especially for a new title such as Hogwarts Legacy.