The team at Digital Foundry, the technical arm of the Eurogamer network, conducted a thorough examination of Hogwarts Legacy across multiple consoles to determine where the adventure feels most authentic and runs with the fewest technical hiccups. In their analysis, PlayStation 5 emerged as the platform delivering the strongest overall performance, providing a stable blend of visuals and responsiveness that aligns closely with how the game was intended to feel by its creators.
Hogwarts Legacy offers several graphics presets that players can toggle to balance fidelity and smoothness. In Performance mode, the game targets a resolution of 1440p with a steady 60 frames per second. On PS5, these targets held firm, preserving the intended visual richness and fluid motion across most scenes. On Xbox Series X, the same mode tends to experience occasional frame-rate drops during particularly demanding moments, though the drops are generally limited in duration and do not drastically degrade the experience. This illustrates how different hardware architectures manage the same software workload in real time, with the PlayStation 5 maintaining smoother performance during the most intense sequences.
Across other presets such as Quality, Ray-traced Quality, and Balanced, the PlayStation 5 continues to deliver visuals that mirror the developers’ artistic direction. Transitions between environments, like moving from indoor spaces to expansive outdoor areas, typically introduce only minor frame-rate fluctuations. When such changes occur, the performance dip is brief, and the gameplay remains essentially steady, keeping players immersed in the magical world without noticeable interruptions.
In contrast, the Microsoft ecosystem shows a different pattern. On many occasions, the system resets both resolution and frame-rate as scenes switch or as stricter rendering options are engaged, a tendency that is most evident in Ray-traced Quality mode. This can lead to perceptible changes in image clarity and motion smoothness during dynamic moments, which some players find distracting. The discrepancy highlights how ray tracing and early-iteration optimizations interact with the console’s rendering pipeline, influencing the final experience for those choosing the higher fidelity paths on Xbox platforms.
Digital Foundry also evaluated the Hogwarts Legacy version on Xbox Series S, the entry-level member of Microsoft’s current generation lineup. This console supports three presets identical in name to those on higher-end systems: Performance, Quality, and Balanced. Unsurprisingly, the Series S opts for more modest visual targets across these presets, maintaining a balance that prioritizes stable frame rates and quick responsiveness over uncompromising pixel density. In practice, the game runs with more consistent performance on Series S, thanks to the reduced target resolutions and more forgiving rendering workloads. This makes shared gameplay experiences with friends across platforms more feasible, especially for players who do not own a more powerful machine but still want a smooth Hogwarts journey.
Taken together, Digital Foundry concludes that Hogwarts Legacy on PlayStation 5 aligns most closely with the experiences observed on Xbox consoles. In other words, the PS5 version offers a refined baseline that generalizes well across the ecosystem, yielding a cohesive feel that fans on other platforms can appreciate. The analysis also invites hope that a future patch from Avalanche Software could further harmonize the technical state of the game on Microsoft consoles, addressing lingering inconsistencies and delivering a more uniform experience across hardware generations. Such improvements would enhance cross-platform parity, enabling broader audiences to enjoy the game with fewer compromises on the visual and technical front. For enthusiasts, this means a more consistent open-world experience that respects both the artistry of Hogwarts Legacy and the capabilities of the latest hardware. The ongoing conversation about performance and fidelity remains central to how developers tune games post-release and how players calibrate their own setups to strike the right balance between stunning visuals and silky gameplay. Source: Digital Foundry.