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If you’ve been stopped playing Hogwarts Legacy due to a black screen on launch – take a look at how we would fix that.
Hogwarts Legacy’s early access launch has been hampered by issues causing crashes and frame drops, though the latest obstacle players are facing is a black screen on launch. It’s not clear what exactly is causing these issues, though until they’re resolved properly, we can offer work-arounds and alternative solutions.
Hogwarts Legacy has had several issues with ray-tracing, though disabling it and optimising DLSS has helped increase performance in-game. However, while these things might improve performance, getting into the game to adjust these settings is impossible if you get a black screen on launching Hogwarts Legacy.
Let’s get straight into how to fix the Hogwarts Legacy black screen on launch issue.
How to fix Hogwarts Legacy black screen on launch
Here’s what we recommend:
- Let the game run for a while
- Restart your PC
- Restart Steam
- Restart Hogwarts Legacy
- Update your graphics card drivers
- Allocate more RAM to Hogwarts Legacy
- Disable GPU overclocking
- Clear shader cache
- Disable Ray-tracing
Let the game run for a while
The most common issue relating to the black screen on launch is that the shaders are taking far too long to load. This isn’t necessarily an issue with your hardware, though more likely that the software isn’t optimised fully for the PC launch.
Some users are reporting that waiting up to anywhere between 10-20 minutes solves the issue. Of course, this isn’t an intended gameplay mechanic implemented by WB, so we hopefully it’s patched fairly shortly.
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Restart Hogwarts Legacy, Steam, and then PC
The age old advice of turn it off and on again never fails to work, so give it a go here. We’d recommend restarting the game, trying it, restarting Steam if that fails, and then a hard reset of your PC if all else fails.
Giving everything a chance to reset might hopefully allow the shaders to properly load, which we anticipate as the reason for the Hogwarts Legacy black screen on launch issue.
Update your graphics card drivers
It’s also possible that you’re running outdated graphics drivers. You can update these via Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, depending on what hardware you’re equipped with.
However, it’s important to note that various issues have been reported with the latest release of Nvidia drivers which seem to be causing similar black screen issues in Hogwarts Legacy. The solution here is similarly to wait out the shaders not loading.
Read More: Best GPU for Hogwarts Legacy – our top picks
Allocate more RAM to Hogwarts Legacy
You can do this via Task Manager by shutting down any processes or applications eating up memory allocation or processing power.
Disable GPU overclocking
You can disable GPU overclocking as a last resort, as it’s possible that this is causing various issues with the shaders loading properly.
Clear shader cache
Hogwarts Legacy landing on a black page could be an issue caused by shaders loading incorrectly, though clearing the shader cache might solve this. You can do this by doing the following:
- Run Disk Cleanup via Windows Search Box
- Locate the disk that your DirectX shaders are in, likely C:
- Locate and Delete the DirectX Shader Cache
Hogwarts Legacy can then be loaded up again, and will likely take a while to load as shaders are generated for the first time again, though it should be a more long-term fix hopefully.
Read More: Can you use a controller with Hogwarts Legacy on PC?
Disable ray-tracing
As mentioned in our does Hogwarts Legacy support ray tracing piece, it’s possible that this feature is preventing the game from loading properly. You can disable it in-game, or you can disable it through your graphics card optimisation software.
We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest updates on Hogwarts Legacy black screen on launch issues, so make sure to check back in with us periodically for the latest news.