Hogwarts Legacy will officially release tomorrow and yesterday, NVIDIA released a new driver for its graphics. The NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 528.49 WHQL adds a game profile for this new game. However, it appears that NVIDIA has a lot of work to do as AMD’s latest GPU, the Radeon RX7900XTX, can be up to 40fps faster than it at 1080p/Ultra Settings/No RT.
For the following tests/benchmarks, we used an Intel i9 9900K, 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900XTX and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 528.49 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 23.1.2 driver.
During our 1080p/Ultra Settings/No Ray Tracing benchmarks, we were literally blown away by the performance gap between the RTX4090 and the RX7900XTX. NVIDIA’s GPU is more powerful than the RX7900XTX. However, and in this particular game, all of NVIDIA’s graphics cards currently underperform.
Normally, some would assume that we’re CPU bottlenecked. And to a degree, they’d be right. However, that’s not the whole picture. If we were only CPU-limited, the AMD Radeon RX7900XTX would not be performing better.
Here are some comparison screenshots from various scenes. The NVIDIA RTX4090 screenshots are on the left and the AMD Radeon RX7900XTX are on the right. As we can see, the RX7900XTX is constantly faster than the RTX4090 at lower resolutions.
The reason behind this performance gap is the additional CPU/memory overhead that NVIDIA’s DX12 drivers introduce. The performance hit of NVIDIA’s DX12 overhead is usually small. In this case, though, the RX7900XTX runs faster by 25-30fps. In some scenes, we can even see a 40fps performance difference. We’re basically looking at a 30% performance difference, which is huge. And that is without AMD releasing any optimized drivers for this game yet.
The good news, at least for RTX40 owners, is that they can enable DLSS 3’s Frame Generation. By doing that, they can overcome this DX12 driver overhead. Still, NVIDIA should not be relying on such techniques. After all, this huge DX12 driver overhead affects all of its GPUs.
It’s also worth noting that even owners of high-end CPUs will experience this issue. This is precisely why you’ve seen the RTX4090 underperforming in numerous YouTube videos, even at native 4K. And, similarly to other games, this issue gets worse the moment you enable the Ray Tracing effects.
We’ve already informed NVIDIA about our findings. Hopefully, the green team will improve things via future drivers.
Stay tuned for our PC Performance Analysis!
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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