Hogwarts Legacy PC CPU Performance- How bad is it?

all right this is a follow-up to my previous video where I test out some gpus but I identified the CPU as the limit especially when Ray tracing but I was on a very high-end CPU and I didn't have time in that video to try out some other CPUs so what are you looking at right now right now you see me running around hogsmeade and we're getting under 60 FPS much of the time I'm going to restart an average uh average Benchmark run here um and what is this well we're running on an Intel i5 9600k so a mid-range Intel CPU from what was it 2018 2019 about around there and you can see that I am again below 60 FPS in hogsmead and you can see all the CPU cores this is a six core six thread CPU and I'm displaying all of them and you can see well they're not all 100 maxed out there's often at least one thread showing um over 80 utilization which is telling me that it is limited by a single thread in in the overall performance here that's why we're not able to do better the GPU is not the problem here if you look at the GPU we're at around 50 between 40 and 50 GPU utilization so the GPU here is capable of much much more I'll go ahead and show you where we're at here uh So currently this well I'm on a 4k monitor and this doesn't have exclusive full screen it's just not an option uh so I'm but I'm still rendering at 1080p from there and then um we have the RTX 4070 ti so the 4070 TI is about as powerful as an RTX 3090 in most situations so this is a very high-end uh GPU for this system we're running it um ultra settings but with Ray tracing turned off and so this is just how demanding it is even without Ray tracing on a reasonable mid-range gaming CPU from just a few years ago now there are definitely other areas of the game that are not this demanding but I was also curious in this area if there was much we could do so I'm going to reset the average counter and you can see the average the current FPS is the one on the left the average is the one uh in the middle after the the frame time in milliseconds the one on the right is the one percent lows so you can see it running up and down the street a few times uh we're kind of averaging in the lower 50s range let's get a little more data here because what I'm going to do is see if there's anything we can do in the game settings um to try to get closer to a 60 FPS because While most graphic settings affect the GPU some do affect the CPU so we were at a 51 FPS average there let's see if there's anything we can do in the graphic settings to help us out so if we go to The Graphic settings you notice that effects quality says it impacts the CPU and GPU so I'm just going to see if we turn anything that impacts both CPU and GPU to low if it does much for us now Ray tracing has a huge impact on the CPU but we're not touching that yet a population quality does impact CPU performance so we're going to go down to low there and view distance can also impact CPU performance so we're going to go down to low here nothing else here is anything that I I think has much impact on the CPU so I've turned down the relevant CPU impacting options we're going to reset the average frame rate counter and we're going to run up and down this street a few more times and see if we do any better at all uh it is looking a little bit better but maybe not a lot better it does look like our average is now coming out uh actually right around 60 FPS which is nice but it's you know not perfect anyway so I've got to say the CPU limitation especially in hogsmeade right there's other areas of the game where it's not nearly this bad but the CPU limitation here on a a decent mid-range gaming CPU from not too long ago we are able to get up to 60 FPS average although we're still dipping well below that and the one percent lows here are significantly below that uh also I'm on a 16 gigabyte RAM system now because I was curious how the game would run with 16 gigabytes of RAM so we can see that by turning everything way down that seems to have a CPU impact we can we can definitely help but things certainly aren't great and it's also annoying to be able to have to turn all of those way down just to kind of average around 60 and still dip below it now I'm going to turn on Ray tracing and show you just how demanding Ray tracing is I'll need to restart the game I'll edit that bit out of the video oh wait restarted the game went through the Shader compilation again all of that this is now with Ray tracing enabled and now look at this so Ray tracing everyone knows has a big hit on the GPU but my GPU here is still reporting uh below 50 utilization the 4070 TI is good enough at Ray tracing um that Ray tracing at 1080p with these settings at this frame rate is not maxing it out the limiting factor here is once again the CPU and if you look at the frame right here we're now down in the mid 30s the average we're getting here is about 35 FPS on this run up and down and so what we're seeing here is that there is a massive impact to the CPU performance when enabling Ray tracing in this game and so even if you have a GPU that is capable of Ray tracing I think that the optimized settings here in this game for Ray tracing is just to turn them off unless you have just an incredibly fast CPU because even my 7700x was struggling to hit 60 FPS in hogsmeade with Ray tracing enabled in this game so so if you're um trying to use Ray tracing I mean we could try out turning down the ray tracing settings to low and see if that does much for us so far all three settings Reflections Shadows ambient occlusion are still on but we've set it down to low I'm going to reset my frame rate counter and we're going to see if we do any better here I mean if it's better it's not by much I still don't think most people would be targeting um this type of frame rate wow we just dipped um wow we're crashing hard I almost wonder if I need to restart the game uh well it's starting to settle out here a little bit okay yeah frame time graphs all over the place uh it's possible we're starting to run into some vram issues this is a 12 gigabyte card but you can see it's trying to use at least 10 gigabytes and some of that could be spilling over into system RAM and this is only a 16 gigabyte system seems to have settled out a bit here into the mid 30s but wow yeah uh so that's another thing is the vram and Ram uh demands on this game are quite a bit as well but I think we can see here there's not a lot we can do with Ray tracing enabled to rein in the CPU side of things what if we only tried raytraced Shadows just to see if if only Ray Trace Shadows are on and it's only at low if that's still having such a high demand on the CPU so I'm going to reset the frame rate counter again at these settings and yeah it's still looking like the CPU is going to be nowhere near 60 FPS so I think for optimizing the settings I've got to say just turn Ray tracing off if you have one of the fastest CPUs in the world you might consider using it but um or maybe if you're using frame generation to kind of get around that limit on one of the 4000 series cards that kind of a thing okay so the next thing I want to look at is how would a bit of a newer um CPU do so I'm going to hop over to a ryzen 5000 based system and see what kind of CPU performance we get there all right now we've moved to a different system this is a ryzen 5000 base specifically r95950x now that whole generation starting with the 5600 and up should have very similar gaming performance unless the game can actually utilize more than six cores and six threads uh this has the um sorry 16 cores and 32 threads which is why you see such a massive CPU data here we did manage to make it all fit on the screen at least and this is now on an RTX 4080 and the game again testing out the same area we're looking at the average FPS we're getting in the mid 70s but definitely dipping below that and you can see that the game is definitely not capable of utilizing 32 threads that's typical games are very hard to parallel out parallel eyes um that much so that's pretty normal you can look at some of the threads bouncing around to pretty high usage and we're definitely in a uh CPU limited scenario here because the GPU utilization is only in the mid 50s up into the 60 range now what are our actual graphic settings again it's an RTX 4080 I'm playing on a 4K screen but rendering the game at 1080p currently no upscaling no um uh no FSR or dlss any of that it's RTX 4080 we're at the ultra settings and again Ray tracing off so my point here is that if you're on a newer CPU compared to the 9600k here I'll reset the averages now that we're out of the menu but compared to the 9600k that we were at before um so in other words a ryzen 5000 base system even in hogsmeade which is about as demanding as it gets certainly can play the game over 60 FPS um this system the ram by the way is 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3600 CL 16 memory and that can affect the CPU performance as well so pretty fast kit and we've got a lot of it um but not you know as as fast as you could go on a ddr4 based system anyway um what I want to look at next here is what the C what the ray tracing performance is on a ryzen 5000 CPU so let's go ahead and kick that on and I'll have to restart the game for this to actually go into effect all right um so I've switched on Ray tracing and we're still on the same system it's still rendering at 1080p on an RTX 4080 in order to emphasize the CPU right we're trying to intentionally not be GPU Limited in order to see um how far the CPU can go so it's looking like running around hogsmeade with Ray tracing enabled um we are not able to stay at 60 FPS it's looking like we're averaging around 49 in this area now once again I want to repeat that hogsmead is particularly CPU demanding other areas of the game are going to perform significantly better but I did want to emphasize that in a more CPU demanding area of this game with Ray tracing enabled no matter how fast your GPU is on a ryzen 5000 based system you will not be staying over 60 FPS now this is certainly not unplayable but I think this is going to emphasize that my optimized settings for this game on anything other than the fastest CPU in the world maybe a 13900k is probably going to be to just leave Ray tracing off now we could once again um play around with settings a little bit here so again and just to show you here this is the 4080 and this is with uh Ray tracing on at the ultra settings I will mention that if you are on an RTX 4000 based system you are able to enable um the uh frame generation if you do okay I actually identified the issue uh so by turning on dlss it was no longer rendering at 1080p it went back to Native 4K which was why the performance wasn't boosting when we actually turned on frame generation long story short if I'm going to do it this way I'm gonna have to use dls's performance to render the game at 1080P and then upscale so it's not quite Apples to Apples what we're doing but anyway frame generation on what I want to emphasize is that the frame rate will improve dramatically using this um it's gonna in a CPU limited situation almost double so you can see we're now around 100 frames per second um but then I do want to mention that while this improves the emotion fluidity these frames that get generated are not interactive the game engine is unaware of them that's why the CPU um isn't required and why it can help here it doesn't improve the responsiveness of the game is I guess what I'm trying to say now I don't have my PC latency counter up here look at my other video if you want a more in-depth discussion of that but I will say that um if you want to use Ray tracing in this game and you have a 4000 series RTX card I do think that frame generation is going to be the only way to get a decent frame rate also if you're thinking that your CPU is way performing better than mine this game can glitch out and apply frame generation without actually telling you it's applying frame Generation Um so to ensure that it's actually off you would want to turn it on and then back off again manually just to be sure anyway so I wanted to mention um this trick if you have a 4000 series card um the frame generation is probably going to be the only way to get decent Ray tracing performance here now I want to go back to my um ryzen 7000 base system all right we're now on the RTX 4090 but once again rendering at 1080p but this time we're on the uh ryzen 7700x CPU paired with ddrs5 6000cl36 memory so the memory timings could get a little tighter there but pretty fast uh RAM and what I wanted to show here is the uh CPU performance again so running around hogsmeade this is with Ray tracing off but 1080p Ultra and again 1080p not because that's realistic for a 49 of it because we're trying to show the limits on the CPU not the limits on the GPU um we can see that the ryzen 7 700x is able to average around 90 FPS in this extremely demanding hogsmeade scenario now I want to show you once again that Ray tracing will crush the CPU pretty badly even on an extremely powerful CPU like this one so let's go ahead and show you first of all the settings I was at here so you can see them all um there it is RTX 4090 and here was the ultra settings Ray tracing off I'm now going to kick it on for the sake of comparison and restart the video all right now with Ray tracing enabled and running through the city here um setting my frame rate counter to the averages we're going to be averaging around 60 frames per second with the ray tracing enabled so again this is not GPU limited this is seeing the limits of the CPU Ram combo here and again it's frustrating that none of the CPU cores seem to be anywhere near 100 we do see some get to around 60 or so even 70 so I still think it's a CPU limit but I can't help but wonder if there's something um unoptimized about the um maybe how the memory bandwidth gets utilized something like that I don't know but this is also not completely uncommon in Unreal Engine 4 games when enabling Ray tracing it doesn't seem to scale well on the CPU and I saw similar results in Callisto protocol uh you know Witcher 3 Ray tracing update that's not Unreal Engine 4 but you see a similar CPU limitation even on high-end CPUs when hitting the ray tracing so obviously I could kick on the um frame generation here because I'm on a 40 90 but that's not really the point I'm trying to show how good is the CPU here you're capable of about 60 FPS with dips below when using Ray tracing um on a ryzen 7000 series CPU it's looking like now again other areas of the game are going to be a lot easier to run the last performance issue I want to address here real quick is the vram so right now you're seeing a 30 60 versus a 3060 TI at the same settings as 1440p Ultra and the 3060 TI should be the faster card and now it's coming back to being a little bit about the same and then it pulls up a little bit faster again and this is I think a vram spillover because the 3060 has 12 gigabytes of vram 3060 TI has eight so just be careful when you're setting the the GPU settings um that you choose settings that aren't spilling over on the vram now one option to help control that is upscaling the game so if you're using dlss fsr2 something like that that will by lowering the rendering resolution of the game it will help you rein in some of the vram requirements other settings are like textures things like that uh anyway this isn't this video is focused more on the CPU but I did just want to mention that the uh the vram requirements here can be quite High Ray tracing goes even further so other than that though I think the gpus actually don't perform that badly um uh running the game at ultra settings with no Ray tracing as long as you're within your vram budget is fine and I was even able to get a GTX 1060 running at 60 FPS at 1080p medium with fsr2 quality upscaling um but people on a GPU that old are likely running into CPU and RAM limitations and again the RAM usage is also quite high so if you're under 16 gigabytes of RAM and even at 16 gigabytes you might be running into some issues anyway I gotta go I got some other things to do today hope all of you have an excellent day huge thank you to subscribers and channel members and all of that and yeah have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 63,822

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Id: hO94Ksz6bNo

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023