While a demanding game, Hogwarts Legacy exhibits unusual performance artifacts. We offer some tweaks to help clean it up.
Of course, that’s with all of these fixes applied. Without the fixes in place, the game barely runs at all with ray-tracing enabled, as we demonstrated yesterday. To be clear, these fixes are not going to completely resolve all of your performance problems in Hogwarts Legacy, but they can drastically improve performance, at least for a while. The game seems to have some kind of memory leak, and performance definitely degrades over time; you’ll probably want to restart it every couple of hours.
Once you’ve done that, scroll down to Control Flow Guard (CFG), check “Override system settings”, and then turn it off. You can also disable CFG globally if you want, but we don’t recommend that. Click Apply, and then close the window; you’re done with this tweak. This tweak does slightly reduce your system’s security while you’re playing Hogwarts Legacy, but it’s a pretty small risk considering that this is not an online game.
For the PoolSize value, the default value is one half of your video RAM, in megabytes. You can do the math: take your video RAM number in gigabytes, divide by two, multiply by 1024. However, some users recommend using lower settings, like 3072 or 2048. It’s possible that the main benefit from these configuration settings is reducing the video RAM pool available to the texture streaming engine. You can expect that these aggressive texture streaming settings will cause additional texture pop-in, most notably when you first load into the game, but we found the trade-off in smoothness to be very well worth it.
With both of these tweaks in place, we found performance improved tremendously on a GeForce RTX 4080, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3060, and on a Radeon RX 6800 XT. The biggest improvement was on the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which could barely run the game at all before the tweaks, but comes out smelling like roses afterward.
