Hogwarts Legacy — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 5% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Texture Quality at High (5% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Hogwarts Legacy: At Ultra, Hogwarts Legacy loads 4K texture maps for stone walls, wood panelling, and fabric surfaces throughout the castle — these stream into VRAM via UE4's texture streaming pool. At 1080p, High is sufficient and well within 6 GB VRAM. At 4K Ultra, expect 10–12 GB VRAM consumption; dropping to High at 4K reclaims roughly 2 GB with negligible visual difference. Exceeding VRAM budget causes streaming hitches during corridor transitions between Hogwarts wings.

Typical impact 8-25% · 14% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (14% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Hogwarts Legacy: UE4's cascaded shadow map system in Hogwarts Legacy is configured with multiple directional light cascades for the outdoor Scottish Highlands and additional local shadow-casting lights inside the castle. Ultra substantially increases shadow map resolution and cascade count, adding significant fill-rate and memory cost. The outdoor Hogsmeade area and Forbidden Forest, where many shadow-casting trees and structures coexist, are the most shadow-intensive scenes. Dropping from Ultra to High recovers roughly 8–12% framerate with minimal visible degradation beyond soft shadow edges.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Hogwarts Legacy RT adds reflections on marble floors, glass, and water surfaces inside Hogwarts castle. Beautiful but costly — 25-35% FPS reduction. The Great Hall and library benefit most.

Typical impact 3-20% · 6% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (6% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Hogwarts Legacy: With ray tracing disabled, Hogwarts Legacy falls back to screen-space reflections (SSR) at Medium and above. Inside the castle — particularly the Astronomy Tower and flooded dungeon corridors — SSR captures reflections of architecture that screen-space tracing can resolve. High increases the SSR ray march step count and resolution, improving accuracy but adding GPU cost. Off falls back entirely to static cubemap probes, which are clearly visible on flat wet stone surfaces. Medium offers the best balance — SSR handles most in-castle reflections credibly without the cost of High's extended march budget.

Typical impact 5-18% · 8% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Hogwarts Legacy: UE4's froxel-based volumetric fog is active throughout Hogwarts Legacy — in the Great Hall, the misty Scottish Highlands, and the underground caves. The 3D froxel volume accumulates scattered light and shadow at each step, which is expensive when many light sources (torches, chandeliers, spell effects) interact with the fog volume simultaneously. High setting increases froxel grid resolution and per-froxel sample count noticeably. Dropping from High to Medium saves 8–14% framerate, especially in the Great Hall and outdoor scenes at dusk where god-ray volumetrics are fully active.

Typical impact 5-20% · 10% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Foliage Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls density, LOD transitions, and rendering quality for non-grass vegetation — trees, bushes, ferns, and vines. Higher settings increase the number of foliage instances, delay the transition from full 3D meshes to billboard imposters, and use higher-poly foliage meshes. In UE5 games using Nanite foliage, this controls the mesh cluster granularity and streaming distance. The primary cost drivers are massive overdraw from layered alpha-tested foliage cards and the high draw call count from thousands of individually-placed foliage instances.

In Hogwarts Legacy: The Forbidden Forest and open world have dense vegetation. Ultra renders individual leaves with wind physics — one of the heaviest settings.

Typical impact 3-10% · 5% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Post-Process Quality at High (5% fps cost).

Controls the overall quality of the fullscreen post-processing effect stack including tone mapping, color grading (LUT application), bloom (bright-pass filter with multi-stage Gaussian blur), lens flare, auto-exposure (luminance histogram compute shader), and screen-space lens distortion. Higher settings run these effects at full resolution, use larger blur kernels for bloom, and enable additional effects. The total cost is the sum of multiple fullscreen passes — each reading and writing the entire framebuffer.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Post-process quality in Hogwarts Legacy governs bloom (the soft glow around torches and spell effects), auto-exposure via UE4's luminance histogram, lens flare, and color grading LUT application. The bloom pass is particularly visible in the Great Hall's candlelit environment and during spell casting, where bright particle effects generate significant flare. Ultra runs all passes at full resolution with large blur kernels. Dropping to Medium runs the bloom extraction and blur at half resolution, which is nearly imperceptible on most displays and recovers 3–5% framerate.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend View Distance at High (8% fps cost).

Sets the maximum distance at which world geometry, props, and objects are rendered. The engine performs frustum culling and occlusion culling on all objects — increasing view distance dramatically increases the number of objects passing visibility tests, leading to more draw calls submitted to the GPU command processor. In UE5 titles, this also affects Nanite virtual geometry streaming range. The CPU cost of scene traversal and draw call submission often bottlenecks before the GPU at extreme view distances.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Controls how far Hogsmeade buildings and landscape features render. Low causes noticeable pop-in flying on broomstick.

Typical impact 3-12% · 8% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (8% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In Hogwarts Legacy: LOD in Hogwarts Legacy controls UE4's screen-size LOD bias for all static and skeletal meshes — castle architecture, village buildings, NPC models, and props. Ultra holds full-resolution geometry visible at greater distances. In Hogsmeade, the density of unique building meshes and street props means Ultra LOD stresses the GPU rasterizer even on high-end hardware. High is indistinguishable from Ultra except at long broomstick flight distances. Low introduces visible geometric simplification on NPC faces and building cornices at moderate range. Medium or High is the recommended sweet spot for most GPU tiers.

Typical impact 3-15% · 7% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Effect Quality at High (7% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Effect quality controls the particle count, simulation complexity, and GPU particle rendering for all spell VFX in Hogwarts Legacy — Avada Kedavra's green tendrils, Expelliarmus flashes, and environmental fire torches. At Ultra, emitters spawn denser particle counts rendered as mesh particles with dynamic point-light contributions per effect, adding temporary light sources that the clustered lighting pass must evaluate. In large combat encounters with multiple spells overlapping, Ultra effect quality produces significant overdraw from layered transparent particles. Dropping to High removes per-effect dynamic lighting and reduces emitter density, saving 5–10% in heavy combat.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at Medium (3% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Hogwarts Legacy's anti-aliasing modes map to UE4's built-in AA pipeline. High uses temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) at full quality — accumulating sub-pixel jitter samples across frames using motion vectors, which resolves fine castle battlements and hair but can ghost around fast-moving spell particles. Medium reduces TAA sample quality. Low falls back to FXAA, which is cheap but softens the image perceptibly on the castle's high-contrast stone edges. If DLSS or FSR is enabled, their internal temporal reconstruction replaces TAA entirely, making the standalone AA setting largely irrelevant when upscalers are active.

Typical impact 5-18% · 10% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Population Density at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the density of vehicles and pedestrians in the game world. The engine spawns entities based on population zone definitions and distance from the player. Each pedestrian requires CPU-side navigation (A* pathfinding on nav mesh), animation state machine evaluation, and GPU-side draw calls. Vehicles add physics simulation (rigid body dynamics, wheel raycasts, traffic AI). The cost is overwhelmingly CPU-bound — the GPU handles NPC rendering efficiently via instanced skinned meshes, but the CPU must tick AI, physics, and animation for every active entity.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Population density governs NPC spawn counts in Hogsmeade village and the castle's common areas. Each NPC runs UE4's skeletal animation blending system on the CPU — updating bone matrices for clothing, hair, and face rigs — plus navigation mesh queries for crowd movement. At Ultra, Hogsmeade streets feel authentically busy but stress the CPU thread that processes NPC AI and animation. The GPU cost is modest (instanced skinned meshes), but CPU frame time in Hogsmeade can increase by 3–8 ms at Ultra versus Low, particularly relevant on 6-core CPUs where draw call submission and NPC AI compete for threads.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Hogwarts Legacy ships with DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 support via the official DLSS SDK. On RTX 40-series GPUs, DLSS 3 Frame Generation pairs with Reflex to add synthetic frames while keeping latency controlled. Quality mode renders at ~67% of native resolution — at 4K this means a 2560×1440 render target fed to the neural upscaler, recovering 35–50% framerate with sharp output on castle stone textures and foliage. Performance mode becomes the preferred tier for RTX 30-series users targeting 60 fps at 4K. DLSS suppresses the TAA ghosting that otherwise appears around spell particle trails.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Hogwarts Legacy: FSR 2 in Hogwarts Legacy provides temporal upscaling on all GPU vendors using a compute shader pipeline. It uses motion vectors from UE4's TAA pipeline and jittered rendering to reconstruct detail. Quality mode (67% render scale) is recommended as a minimum — lower modes introduce softness on the castle's fine tracery and text on Hogwarts banners. FSR 2 handles the game's spell particle effects well due to its reactive mask implementation. On AMD RDNA 3 hardware, FSR 2 Quality at 1440p typically yields framerates comparable to DLSS Balanced on equivalent NVIDIA hardware.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Intel XeSS in Hogwarts Legacy uses UE4's motion vector and depth buffer output and runs the neural reconstruction network — on Intel Arc GPUs this uses XMX matrix accelerator hardware; on other GPUs it falls back to DP4a compute shaders. Quality mode (77% render scale) preserves the fine detail of Hogwarts stonework and tapestries better than lower tiers. On non-Intel hardware, XeSS Quality is broadly competitive with FSR 2 Quality with slightly different temporal stability characteristics — FSR tends to handle fast spell particle motion marginally better, but XeSS preserves static scene sharpness more consistently.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Motion Blur at High (2% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Motion blur in Hogwarts Legacy uses UE4's velocity buffer to apply per-object directional blur. At High, broomstick flight and spell-casting camera sweeps produce strong streaking that some players find disorienting. The pass itself is a single fullscreen resolve with 8–16 depth taps per pixel — cost is modest (1–4% framerate). Disabling motion blur is primarily an aesthetic choice and is recommended for players sensitive to image softening during fast travel sequences over Hogsmeade. Low provides a subtle cinematic feel without the aggressive smearing of High.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Hogwarts Legacy, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Hogwarts Legacy: Hogwarts Legacy's depth of field is a binary toggle that applies a cinematic bokeh blur during cutscenes and certain cinematic camera moments — including Dumbledore's study scenes and memory pensieve sequences. During gameplay, DoF is used sparingly on out-of-focus background elements in the Scottish landscape. The UE4 CoC-based separable blur pass is not active during standard combat or exploration, so the performance cost is only realized during scripted cinematic sequences. Disabling it has negligible gameplay-moment impact and removes 2–5% GPU cost during cutscenes.