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Hogwarts Legacy early access has been here for a few days now, and while we’ve enjoyed a few bugs such as the main character turning blue, others relating to frame drops, crashing, and black screens on launch are less amusing to us. It seems as though the game still needs some polishing off, and there’s even been a few reports that the latest Nvidia drivers are the problem with Hogwarts Legacy’s performance.
Are the latest Nvidia drivers crashing Hogwarts Legacy?
Nvidia launched their most recent drivers on February 8th, though there was no mention of Hogwarts Legacy included. It seems as though they’re taking their time releasing Game Ready drivers for the game, while Intel seem to have beaten them to the punch.
However, after gamers updated their graphics card drivers to the latest 528.49 update, there were several reports that the latest drivers were causing issues with the game loading properly. The report in question was noted on the Steam Discussion page for Hogwarts Legacy, and was headlined: “DO NOT UPDATE NVIDIA DRIVER TO LATEST”.
It seems as though the original poster of the report jumped the gun slightly, as the responses suggest that the latest Nvidia drivers aren’t actually the issue. It seems as though the problem isn’t caused by specific drivers, but Hogwarts Legacy’s lack of optimisation in general.
That said, there’s enough people finding issues with the drivers to suggest that there could be something there. In fact, some people are going as far as rolling back their drivers, which you find out about here.
Nvidia have yet to release their ‘Game Ready’ drivers that usually follow the launch of a game of this scale, although some users have reported that there is a Hogwarts Legacy profile in the latest driver release.
Hogwarts Legacy performance issues fixes
The reported frame drops and crashing seem to be a symptom of Hogwarts Legacy’s current state, and there’s little we can do as of yet. The most common fixes include the following:
- Deleting shader cache
- Disabling ray-tracing
- Enabling DLSS
None of these are guaranteed fixes for Hogwarts Legacy performance issues, and all we can really hope for is a performance patch and Game Ready driver updates.
We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest updates on Hogwarts Legacy performance issues and the latest Nvidia drivers – with the hopes that it becomes playable for anyone experiencing the inevitable bugs of a newly launched game. In the meantime, you might be interested in reading about if Hogwarts Legacy supports DLSS and ray tracing.
