Avalanche Software has released a DLSS 5 update patch for "Hogwarts Legacy." Foreign media outlet Dsogaming conducted benchmark performance tests and captured numerous comparison screenshots. Can DLSS 5 bring a revolutionary change to "Hogwarts Legacy"? Let's find out.
Hardware platform for this DLSS 5 test: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor, 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM, NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics card, 64-bit Windows 10 OS, and NVIDIA Game Ready driver version 621.14. It is evident that compared to the DLSS 5 launch trailer, developers have significantly toned down the actual in-game effects of DLSS 5, resulting in only subtle visual changes.
In the final two sets of scenes, DLSS 5 provided no image quality improvement whatsoever, yet significantly increased performance overhead. Disabling DLSS 5 actually resulted in sharper ground textures. Even in the first three comparison sets, enabling DLSS 5 worsened the ambient occlusion (AO) effect on the grass, whereas DLSS 5 is supposed to enhance AO rather than degrade it. The only redeeming quality was the improved texture of the protagonist's coat and hair. In the vast majority of comparison screenshots, the protagonist's face showed only a slight improvement in image quality.
Enabling DLSS 5 also incurs significant performance penalties. "Hogwarts Legacy" is a CPU-bound game, so I selected two representative scenes for benchmarking: Hogsmeade Village (CPU-bound scene) and the game opening (GPU-bound scene). Tested at 4K resolution, with all settings maxed out and ray tracing enabled.
Hogsmeade Village: Native 123 FPS in DLSS Quality mode. After enabling DLSS 5, it dropped to 98 FPS, a 20% performance decrease. Opening GPU-intensive scene: 173 FPS without DLSS 5, dropping to 100 FPS with DLSS 5 enabled, a massive 42% performance drop.
Dsogaming's overall opinion on DLSS 5 in "Hogwarts Legacy" is that it offers only minor image quality improvements at a high performance cost. It falls far short of the transformative visuals brought by third-party DLSS 5 mods. While DLSS 5 could have revolutionized PC gaming visuals, in "Hogwarts Legacy," it merely provides a slight improvement.
Comparison Screenshots (Top: Original Screenshot, Bottom: Screenshot with DLSS 5 Enabled):
