Hogwarts Legacy PC Performance Analysis

in my last couple of videos people told me stop benchmarking this game until you get to hogsmead or Hogwarts some said the Sorting ceremony some said the Hogwarts grounds well anyway I'm at hogsmead now and they said performance would tank here well there's a lot going on first of all this is an RTX 4090 so the fastest gaming GPU on the planet uh with then paired up with a very high-end system it's a ryzen 7700x processor with 32 gigabytes of ddr5 6000 memory now a uh Intel 13900k is faster in some games the 7700x is faster than others I haven't tested them against each other in this game but the point is it's a very high-end system but you can see that I'm struggling to maintain 60 FPS here let me reset the average counters if you look at the frame rate counters um and you can see that the average is around 60 running up and down Hogwarts but the thing is I'm actually rendering this game at 1080p it's 4K but it's with dlss performance and the thing is the GPU utilization if you look at the top left corner of your screen right now is below 50 much of the time meaning the uh the 4090 isn't the problem here it's something else going on with the rest of the system so I've also displayed all of my CPU cores so this is an 8 core 16 thread CPU which is why you see 16 CPUs listed there and then a total CPU percentage at the bottom just listed as CPU and then you also see the RAM and there's two numbers next to the ram the ram is the total amount allocated by the system and the one on the right is a lower number which is what my at least program this is the MSI afterburner running Riva tuner statistics server is reporting as the amount actually used by the game process if you hear my daughter coughing in the background or any Children's shows in the background I'm home uh taking care of my sick kid she's watching cartoons we were playing some Harry Potter together and we just got hogsmeade she said I could make a video to talk to you guys about it anyway um so as you can see here this is definitely not the GPU causing the problem uh so I don't think it's actually that this area of the game becomes more demanding on the gpus than what I was benchmarking earlier um so what's going on here uh one thing I've got to say is the reason one reason the performance is so low here is that Ray tracing is enabled and Ray tracing uh hits the CPU as well as the GPU um you can see here that it's rendering at 1080p upscale to 4K using dlss performance and I don't have frame generation on uh and again if we look at the actual graphic settings it's Ultra Plus um the array tracing set to ultra one thing I'll show you is that going down to the low Ray tracing settings is not going to really significantly improve my performance because while that will make it easier on the GPU I'll reset the average counter here on the frame rate we're still averaging about the same it's going to make it easier on the GPU but it's not going to make it easier on the CPU because I think it's still calculating the same basic bvh calculations that the CPU does for Ray tracing anyway so you can see the performance didn't really help going down to low so I guess what I'm saying is if you're using the ray tracing in this game your likely CPU limited when you're seeing your frame rates drop especially if you're using dlss and it's not really helping now that's not saying the game can't become CPU limited without Ray tracing but if you're using Ray tracing it's very likely that the CPU limitation is actually the issue in places like hogsmeade and that's your problem I will mention that if you happen to have be one of the very few people in the world I'll admit who has an RTX 4000 series card this is one of the places where frame generation actually shines so if I turn this on this is going to be the one thing that will actually improve my frame rate in this situation so I'm going to reset the frame rate counter now and check that out we're now over 130 frames per second so why does that work when nothing else does well frame generated frames are not calculated on the CPU they actually the game engine itself is completely unaware of them um so that's what's going on with that so basically the bottleneck here is somewhere in the system the CPU the ram something like that if you happen to have frame generation it can help you but keep in mind that it doesn't improve the responsiveness of the game it improves its motion fluidity I talked about that more in other videos related to frame generation but I did want to mention that this is where frame generation really shines in a CPU limited or in other words not a GPU limited situation if it's somewhere else in the system or game engine causing the issue now some of you guys could be like how can you be CPU limited when none of the CPU threads are reporting 100 utilization well it can be difficult to isolate it because um the processes move around from thread to thread and core Decor you know uh so it's hard to ever catch it at 100 but I I still think that this feels like a CPU limitation it's definitely not a GPU limitation um and I'm not running out of Ram or anything like that and the Ram's fairly fast so that seems like what's happening here now I'm going to restart the game with Ray tracing turned off and then we can look at the fact that I think we're still CPU limited on a lot of graphics cards um even with uh just add a different frame rate when Ray tracing is turned off so let me uh I'll end my video and edit this back in all right we now have Ray tracing turned off you can see overall the frame rate is higher um let me reset the average counter here and I think we're going to be bouncing around in the 80 to 90 FPS range running through hogsmeade I mean the performance isn't terrible the one percent lows though certainly dip uh significantly lower than that you can see that on the far right but if you look at the GPU utilization again we're only uh in the 50 to 60 percent GPU utilization showing that we're limited by something else in the system uh seems to me once again to be some sort of uh CPU slash limitation the GPU is very clearly not being fully utilized and is not the problem and I will verify for you the the settings that we're using here so once again while I'm playing the game on a 4K screen I'm rendering it at 1080p using dlss performance which is why it's very easy for the 4090 to render this is the ultra settings but again um none of the the ray tracing enabled at this point so in other words turning off Ray tracing relieves some of the CPU limit but it allows the CPU to reach a higher frame rate um and depending on your GPU and your CPU this might get you to the point where they're kind of balanced out or whatever but the thing is like I said I'm on one of the fastest gaming CPUs um and it's only even with Ray tracing off able to hit in this you know 80 to 90 even dips into the 70s FPS range with some stutters that kind of a thing so it's certainly not great but I guess my my point here is that I think there's a lot of um CPU limitation happening at times which is why especially people on older CPUs and the game is using a lot of ram although when I actually do again the RAM usage we're at 13 gigabytes but this is why I think a lot of people on older systems might be having issues is the CPU limitations now some of you guys are just like well this is just an RTX 4090 how does it do on a realistic uh realistic GPU so how about before we end this video we test out a couple other gpus in this game that are a lot more budget friendly and we see how far uh they're able to go um so I'm gonna pop in uh what do you guys want to see a 360 TI let's pop one of those in here and test it out all right we just threw a 30 60 TI into this same system and it's at 1440p Native at ultra settings but with no Ray tracing and I thought we'd run around now the game does have Shader pre-compilation and so that uh has definitely occurred well the frame time graph I will say is kind of bumping up and down a bit here now one possibility is some vram spillover that type of thing causing some issues and I do plan on looking at this on a um uh maybe like a 6700 XT that has 12 gigabytes of vram that kind of a thing let me reset the frame rate counter here a bit so yeah it looks quite a bit stuttery especially in the uh the one percent lows here frame time graph and if this was just Shader compilation I think we'd be seeing um it have smoothed out by now since I'm running through the same area a whole bunch now the average frame rate not too bad but yeah there is quite a bit of stutters there so why don't we take a a quick look at the menus here see if we can dial back some settings I think um playing at uh 1440p Ultra for the 3060 TI is not always going to work out without some tweaks especially again um could be related to the gigabytes of vram one thing that will help rain in the vram a bit is using dlss quality so why don't we see if that smooth Smooths things out at all by rendering at a lower internal resolution here let me uh hit my frame rate uh counter reset all right it's not perfectly smooth but the overall average is much much higher and the one percent lows are also a lot higher and the frame time graph does feel significantly smoother in fact it feels like we're starting to see a CPU Ram system limitation of some other kind because you can see the GPU utilization is not at a hundred percent we're kind of in the upper 80s to lower 90 percent range a lot of this time so pretty interesting so I guess what I'm concluding from this is that the 3060 TI itself is able to play the game reasonably well at 1440p again you could use dlss quality upscaling the other option is we could try um turning a dlss off and then just reducing the actual graphic settings what if we try going down to 1440p medium and this should again both reduce the GPU demand and the vram requirements all of that so let's try that out all right um seems like frame time graph is still not super smooth one percent lows are still lower than I would like so yeah it's it's not perfect it's playable but it's not perfectly smooth or anything like that so anyway um it's interesting we could take a look at 1080p if we're able to do that in this game without a full restart which would be obnoxious one one other thing I've noticed about this game is there's no exclusive full screen mode so it can get a little bit um a little bit annoying on the overall resolution settings so I think if we go to yeah so we can't adjust the overall resolution we could just render at 1080P and then I guess it's going to do its own like TAA upscaling to 1440p so it's not exactly 1080p but I want to restart the whole system in game just for a bit of a 1080p test so here's like 1080p medium basically a little bit of upscaling involved again the overall frame rate's very high it seems like we're again more limited by the system than by the GPU itself the one percent lows again still a bit stuttery why don't we pop in another GPU let's look at an AMD I think the 6700 XT would be an interesting choice similar price and performance a little bit cheaper a little bit faster with Ray tracing off uh on that one let's see how it does all right I fired up the 6700 XT we're at ultra settings we are at 1440p no upscaling no Ray tracing and we're back in hogsmead let me reset the frame rate counter start sprinting up and down the street again so um hey for some reason it's not giving me all my GPU stats well that's interesting well we at least get the utilization and the memory speeds not sure what's up with my stats reporter but um my kids that I can only spend a few more minutes making this video before we get back to playing so it's looking like at these settings we are once again averaging a little over 60 FPS the one percent lows are not that high however do notice that compared to running the 3060 TI which is an eight gigabyte card the one percent lows seem better and if you look at the memory uh usage and allocation which you see in green at the top there um it's allocating over 10 gigabytes and reports a utility actual usage of over nine gigabytes so that could explain the worst one percent lows on our 36 DTI these cards are generally similar in performance although the 6700 XT usually has a bit of an edge when you're not Ray tracing um let's go ahead and look at what if we did a couple of things maybe before we leave 1440p we think about okay what if we upscaled with fsr2 quality just to see what that might do for us reset the frame rate counter and we are now um averaging well over 90 FPS the one percent lows have improved a bit as well the GPU is still fully utilized at least for the most part now one thing I'm going to mention on that front is that amd's drivers tend to have less overhead or something about it in CPU limited situations it's normal for AMD gpus to actually outperform Nvidia gpus once the GPU is no longer the limit the way the drivers work something about it um just consistently in a CPU limited situation has the AMD gpus perform ahead um just due to the difference in how they're using the system all right if we went ahead and looked at maybe going down to the I keep pushing the wrong menu button if you were using this GPU at 1080P and I actually pushed the correct menu button to get settings then we could again it's not true 1080p but we're going to turn upscaling off that way render the game at 1080p it probably does a bit of a temporal upscale which shouldn't have too much performance overhead look at the 1080p ultra settings results and reset the frame rate counters and run around so again looks like we're able to Max the game out at 1080p no problem um looks like our averages are 80s to 90s one percent lows around 60 frame time graph again looks pretty decent so again it looks like it's not so much that this game is incredibly demanding on the gpus it's that if the rest of your system can't keep up in an area like hogsmeade which has a lot going on on the CPU that we might have some problems now with that in mind I actually want to retest my GTX 1060 which I've already tested in a separate video um but people said that when you got to somewhere like hogsmead it would just crumble I'm curious if it's just that the CPU and RAM situation on the systems where people own a 1060 are crumbling whether it's actually the 1060 itself so let's pop out and take a quick look at the 1060. all right we fired up the GTX 1060 this is the six gigabyte version so keep in mind if you have the three gigabyte version you might run out of vram anyway we're at 1080p native no upscaling yet and we're starting out at the ultra settings we will definitely turn out turn down from here but what I was interested in is how do we perform in hogsmeade um looks like we're definitely down in the 20-something FPS range at these settings so we're absolutely going to turn them down immediately but if my theory is correct we should be able to at least get playable frame rates uh turning things down as long as the CPU which should not be an issue in this system can keep up so still currently on the native um 1080p with medium settings and now it's looking actually very playable we're in hogsmeade we're in the mid 40 FPS range but again it's very likely that a CPU you know a mid-range to low end CPU from the era of the GTX 1060 or even somebody who upgraded to a GTX 1060 from an even older CPU um might be having problems here we're also showing 14 gigabytes of RAM being actually utilized that system Ram frame time graph doesn't look great but again this is not [Music] um this is not an unplayable experience and again that's at 1080p native medium settings and I think if we utilized a bit of upscaling as well um so we I think rather than just turn it down here we'll go ahead and use something like fsr2 quality I think we'll actually reach some pretty decent frame rates overall once again if the rest of the system can keep up which again in this computer is not an issue we're actually very close to 60 FPS here um we go above we go below but yeah we are very close to a 60 FPS average fsr2 quality at 1080p so again rendering below 1080P and upscaling and at the medium settings so I think my previous video testing out the GTX 1060 was correct the GTX 1060 itself is able to play this game at 60 frames per second if you upscale fsr2 quality at at the medium preset but the rest of your PC might not be able to keep up that's the piece that I didn't focus on in that video that I maybe should have um anyway uh I think I might have enough time to throw in one of the high-end new AMD gpus before we're done just for fun all right we now have the 7900 XTX and this is the graphic settings at Ultra with no Ray tracing native 4K resolution I went ahead and pulled up the AMD overlay because on the newer AMD cards I can't get the uh like power usage and things like that to display so anyway you got even more stats to take a look at overall looks like we're um averaging in the mid 70 FPS range running through here and the GPU utilization is staying pegged at a hundred percent so we are not running into a CPU limit at these settings now um just for fun let's go ahead and say what if we were playing with fsr2 quality which would um should significantly boost our frame rate look pretty good at 4K this is similar to dlss Quality if you're familiar with that and here we go uh we're now averaging over 100 FPS the GPU utilization is still in the Upper 90 to 100 range so pretty good on that front and the one percent lows are 60 ish so looking pretty good uh I do think I wanna and I I'll just mention that if you're playing at 1440p you'd get even slightly better results than this because well fsr2 quality renders the game at 1440p um it then has some overhead from the fsr2 quality I think I do want to kick on the ray tracing just to play around with that a little bit see how that goes I'll have to restart the game in order to do that though so give me a second all right kicking on Ray tracing at 4K and this is all of it turned on to the ultra settings takes a massive performance hit as expected we're now averaging close to 30 FPS but below it and the one percent lows are in the teens we obviously would not want to play like this uh so we're going to test out a couple of quick changes what if we tried going to the low Ray tracing rather than the ultra Ray tracing see what that does but honestly it's more likely going to be a um upscaling solution that we end up with but let's see what happens here resetting the frame rate averages okay so we actually do gain quite a bit by reducing it to low instead of ultra um but still would say the overall frame rates a lot lower than I would like averaging around 40 it looks like it's still looking like it's not a CPU limitation because the GPU is pegged right around 100 as we do this so let's go ahead and open the correct menu because I'm apparently failing at that and let's go ahead and um try out some upscaling so let's go with fsr2 quality which at 4K does look pretty good this also gives you somewhat of an idea what the 1440p performance would be like but again actual 1440p native would perform a bit better because you don't have the fsr2 overhead from that upscaling algorithm all right resetting the frame rates it looks like we're now averaging over 60 FPS so Ray tracing low but all of the effects turned on this game does have ambient occlusion shadows and Reflections they're the low settings but 4K fsr2 quality 60 FPS average and it's still not a CPU limitation because the GPU is once again pegged around 100 percent so I'm curious now if we um we press some buttons let's change the uh Ray tracing back to let's go to ultra again I just want to kind of see where we're at there so this is with upscaling now at Ray tracing Ultra and yeah it definitely takes its toll we're down into the 50-ish low 50 range on the averages and the one percent lows are a lot lower now let's go ahead and look at what if we just upscaled a little bit more aggressively so if we want to keep the RT Ultra everything maxed what if we went down to FSR to balanced reset the frame rate counter and looks like we have now achieved around a 60 FPS average now in my testing I have not been blown away by the ray tracing effects in this game so given its heavy hit to both the CPU and the GPU performance wise uh you know you'll want to make your own call there on whether that makes sense to you but hopefully we got a better idea of how this game is performing in a variety of gpus and we've seen that the CPU limitation is probably a lot of the problem for a lot of people and again turning off Ray tracing does help the CPU limitation it also dials in a less vram and RAM usage as well so anyway I've got to go ahead and start taking care of my sick kit again and uh hopefully you guys found this interesting and I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 153,256

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Id: zofJ5yFvajA

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023