Although the game isn’t officially out just yet, those who’ve reviewed or tested Hogwarts Legacy have reported some apparent issues with ray-tracing effects in the game. Luckily, it appears that there’s a workaround to significantly improve the quality of ray tracing effects within the PC version -unofficial Hogwarts Legacy PC tweaks.
As posted by Reddit user ‘Knochey‘, and picked up by DSOGaming, editing the game’s engine.ini files can greatly improve the quality of ray tracing reflections and ambient occlusion. Please note that by making these changes, there appears to be an additional drop in performance, but these tweaks seem to be a temporary fix for most of the ray tracing issues on PC (if your rig is up to the task, that is). We’ve included some comparison screenshots below, as supplied by ‘Knochey’:
Here’s what you have to do in order to improve ray tracing effect quality:
Unofficial Hogwarts Legacy PC ini Tweaks
Open the game’s Engine.ini file, located in “C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalHogwarts LegacySavedConfigWindowsNoEditor”
Use the following settings.
[SystemSettings]
r.RayTracing.Reflections.ScreenPercentage=100
r.RayTracing.Reflections.SamplesPerPixel=1
r.RayTracing.Reflections.MaxRoughness=0.7
r.RayTracing.AmbientOcclusion.Intensity=1
Interesting tweaks for sure, and it will be interesting to see how a post-launch patch will address the reported ray tracing issues.
Hogwarts Legacy releases globally later this week on February 10 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series XS, The PS4, Xbox One, and Switch versions will arrive later this year. Here’s what we wrote about this beautiful adventure in our review in progress.
In terms of story, Hogwarts Legacy also manages to capture the magical feel of Harry Potter. It does it successfully by being set a good century before the events of the novels. We’ll meet a few Weasleys, even a gaunt, to name a few. The only known characters from the other formats you’ll know are the ghosts of Hogwarts, with you crossing with Peeves, chatting with Nearly-Headless Nick (if you’re Gryffindor, I assume other houses will be different), and other longer-term fixtures. Fortunately, and as far as I am, the game manages to forge its path incredibly well, adding in a few canonical elements, such as ancient magic. I’m not at the end, so if it is canon, I’m curious how they explain away the lack of ancient magic in later stories.
