One of my biggest issues with Hogwarts Legacy was its Ray Tracing effects. Even when using the game’s Ultra RT settings, these RT effects can be underwhelming. Thankfully, PC gamers have figured out ways via which they can significantly improve the quality of these Ray Tracing effects.
For starters, the view distance for the Ray Tracing Shadows is a bit low, even on Ultra Settings. As a result of that, there are some truly awful pop-in issues when exploring the game’s open-world environments.
Furthermore, Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion appeared to be broken in our initial tests. For whatever reason, Avalanche has used some really low-quality settings for it. Hell, you can even see the screen-space AO artifacts, even when enabling RTAO.
To be honest, I didn’t mind the quality of the RT Reflections. However, the RT Shadows and the RTAO were huge disappointments. And, thankfully, you can increase their quality.
All you have to do is open the game’s Engine.ini file, located in “C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Hogwarts Legacy\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor”, and 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
Do note that these tweaks will bring an additional performance hit. Still, they currently resolve all of the issues we had with the game’s RT implementation, so that’s a big plus.
Reddit’s member Knochey, who has discovered this, shared the following comparison screenshots. And, as you can see, the visual improvements that these tweaks bring is enormous. The Default RT screenshots are on the left, and the modified RT screenshots are on the right.
UPDATE:
After testing these tweaks, I can confirm that RTAO now looks significantly better. However, there are still noticeable pop-in issues when using RT Shadows. So, for the time being, I suggest using only RTAO and RT Reflections.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Good news as i said via config we can edit RT quailty
I copy-pasted the settings to no effect. I still get the Default RT. Every RT option is set to ULTRA in game menu. Am i doing something wrong?
Nvm, i had to add another line to get the distant shadows:
“r.RayTracing.Culling=0”
But apparently this leads to severe stuttering in some scenes :/
I haven’t noticed any stuttering but it brings a major performance hit. IMO, the best improvement is the RTAO (which now actually works the way it was supposed to).
actually it doesnt, it still a hybrid solution where ssao is still present and when you move the camera the effect will go away along with the camera.
John, can you test this settings paired with the ones you posted?
[System.Settings]
r.RayTracing.Reflections.Hybrid=1
r.RayTracing.Reflections.MaxRayDistance=12000
Hybrid blend Ray Traced reflections with SSR where possible, improving performance – IIRC, Metro Exodus uses this, as well as Control.
ScreenPercentage reduces the rendering resolution of RTReflections to half, dramatically increasing performance, but resulting in flickering around reflective surfaces, so with a substantial visual cost. Don’t know if the default for Hogwarts is 100, so maybe setting it to 100 might improve the RTs alot. EDIT: Saw it was already presented on the post.
MaxRayDistance lowers the maximum distance the rays will trace, improving performance – interesections with geometry further than the threshold won’t have RT reflections, however. Lowest I see work to good results in RT games is 2000 – I reckon it can be increased to higher numbers to improve quality.
MaxRoughness is default roughness threshold, but lowering this setting will offer substantial performance gains. The lower this value is, the more frequently it will fall back to other raster methods for rendering reflections.
Credits for Wessberg post on Reddit, almost verbatim.
Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging on websites
I’m usually an advocate for Ray Tracing, but using RT in this game is a waste of frames.
I still use Reflections, but that is it.
Same and 3080 can’t really handle 4k ultra + RT all. I need to use performance dlss if I wish to have good frames