Tobold's Blog
Saturday, February 11, 2023
 
It's running - for me

I have a 4 year old PC with a Geforce RTX 2070 graphics card. I am running at 2560 x 1440 resolution on a 27" screen. It isn't exactly high end, but I'd call it solid. And on that system Hogwarts Legacy is running well, with the benchmark-suggested "high" graphics settings. No raytracing. I have experienced some minor framerate drops, but nothing that would have gotten into the way of gameplay. The only thing that seems "slow" to me are the loading screens, which might have to do with the game being installed on my larger, regular hard disk, and not on the smaller SSD drive. That is only annoying when I try to "fast travel", which can feel as if walking would have been faster.

My graphics card is on the long list of most used graphics cards in the Steam survey. About 1% of Steam users have the same card, and a lot more of them have similar graphics cards, like the RTX 2060. It isn't really surprising if a triple-A game runs reasonably well on a rather common graphics card with settings that don't really push the limits. I can't tell where the stories about the game not running well on PC are coming from exactly. It could be that a lot of the people who are dissatisfied with the performance of Hogwarts Legacy on their rig have high-end cards like the RTX 4080 and are running ultra high settings with raytracing on. It is obviously annoying if you pay $1,500 for a graphics card and then your game is still stuttering somewhere. Or it is just a question of there being so many different possible configurations possible for a PC that a game running well on 90% of them is still getting a lot of negative feedback from the 10% on which it doesn't.

In the end, there simply isn't much information in the fact that the game runs well for me on my PC, because my PC is different from yours. And my expectations aren't all that high, I mostly play PC games that are less graphically demanding. I'm okay with the quality of the graphics and the performance of Hogwarts Legacy on my PC.

Comments:
The latest Steam Hardware survey shows that the vast majority of PC gamers (80% by my estimate) have hardware less powerful than your RTX 2070. All the online posters both professional and amateur complaining that they can't run games at at 4k ultra an an RTX 4090 are living on a different planet and I am tired of it. You and I are of a generation when we were happy to get a game playing at 30fps on a 1024x768 monitor. I appreciate that games look better these days and in an ideal world I would love all my games to run more than 100 fps at 1440p with all the pretties. However I am very willing to turn down the quality a bit to play the game. If the game itself is any good I stop noticing the graphics almost immediately.

I am a big fan of the "low end gaming" subreddit even though my own PC is not strictly low end. It is just a nice place full of helpful advice to enable gamers get the most out of what ever hardware they have. Perhaps we need a "mid range gaming" subreddit to provide a similar service to those of us with real world mid range kit.

Aside: A quick shout out to adaptive sync monitors (gsync / freesync) these greatly improved my gaming experience on demanding games because they remove the judder you get when your GPU cannot quite keep up with your monitor refresh rate.
 
Good to hear it's running well for you. I have a 3060 so not too far from you in GPU power. What CPU do you have Tobold? I'm currently running a 12400F.
 
I was once happy with my Spectrum running at 256 x 192 on an old television... my current laptop 3060 seems just ridiculous :D
 
@Bigeye My CPU is an Intel Core i7 9700K
 
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