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Patches

First Hogwarts Legacy PC Update released, full patch notes revealed

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Avalanche has released the first PC Update for its latest Harry Potter game, Hogwarts Legacy. According to the release notes, the February 14th Update brings a number of PC-specific tweaks and improvements. As such, we’ve decided to test this patch and see whether these claims were valid.

For starters, this update does fix the game’s awful Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion implementation. RTAO now works great, and you won’t need the tweaks we’ve mentioned in this article. However, RT Shadows still suffer from major pop-in issues.

Hogwarts Legacy - Major Pop-in issues with Ray Tracing Shadows

Below you can find two comparisons. RTAO is on the left and SSAO is on the right. In the first comparison, pay attention to the table at the top left. In the second comparison, pay attention to the improved AO effects on the main character.

HL RTAO-1HL SSAO-1 HL RTAO-2HL SSAO-2

Avalanche also claims that it has resolved the game’s underwhelming performance on NVIDIA’s GPUs. However, that’s not the case. Our Prologue scene (which is GPU-heavy) still runs noticeably worse on NVIDIA’s RTX4090.

Lastly, the team claims that this patch brings a number of shader compilation improvements. However, this patch does not address the game’s traversal stutters.

Hogwarts Legacy February 14th Update Release Notes

Bug Fixes:
General
Online
  • Fixed issues with achievement data being properly pushed to Wizarding World portal after linking.
Gameplay
  • Owl Mail
  • World Events
  • NPC
  • Characters
UI
  • Updated localization text for additional content items.
    Added Build version to first time EULA.
  • Fixed rare occurrence of mission descriptions not being displayed correctly.
Cinematics
  • Corrected VFX presentation of robe transformation.
  • Fixed a stability issue when skipping cutscenes.
  • Fixed a crash when playing cutscenes and cinematics.
Save Game
  • Fixed error of rewriting last autosave slot.
  • Fixed an issue when restarting from last save around not being able to talk to a vendor after initial conversation. Resolves the following reported issues: HL-494, HL-246, HL-1063, HL-590, HL-542, HL-976, HL-965, HL-1158, HL-1184, HL-1089, HL-1240, HL-1031, HL-1490, HL-1433, HL-89, HL-1930, HL-1086, HL-1636, HL-1585, HL-1028, HL-1933, HL-2606, HL-2062, HL-1587, HL-488, HL-498, HL-162, HL-1706, HL-2626, HL-2865, HL-2888, HL-2804, HL-2910, HL-2944, HL-3000, HL-3043, HL-3024.
Performance and Stability
  • Improved performance on Fidelity mode.
  • Fixed rare crash around hovering over the map.
  • Fixed issue with wind causing distortion and stretching of world assets.
  • Also fixed a rare occurrence with material swapping.
  • Fixed a rare crash with map assets state.
  • Fixed Rare crash occurring with in-game world events.
  • Also fixed a memory leak with global lighting system HL-313.
PC Steam/PC Epic Games
Cinematics
  • Fixed audio issues missing or not properly playing.
Controllers
  • Switch Pro controller support updates HL-346.
Upscalers
  • Enable frame generation while DLSS is disabled.
  • Anti-Aliasing and Screen resolution settings disabled when using DLSS and not Super Resolution.
Raytracing
  • Fixed issue with RTAO looking worse than SSAO.
  • Adjusted default setting to Medium Quality.
Performance and Stability
  • Shader type compilation optimization.
  • Shader compilation performance updates and functionality enhancements.
  • Fixed a crash affecting Text2Speech usability.
  • Resolved issues with world assets abruptly being stretched which resolves the following reported issues: HL-305, HL-265.
  • Resolved an issue with Nvidia GPUs having lower frame rate compared to AMD.
DirectX Version 12
  • Please note DirectX Version 12 is required to run Hogwarts Legacy on PC. We do not suggest attempting workarounds to run the game with DirectX Version 11 as this can cause stability issues with launching the game and the player experience.