The ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4070 Ti brings Hogwarts Legacy to glorious life
My decades-long wait is over: I finally have a proper open-world RPG set in the iconic fantasy world of Harry Potter. Now, I can break out of the Muggle world and experience life at Hogwarts for myself. Full of spells to learn, classes to attend, puzzles to solve, and dark wizards to dispatch, Hogwarts Legacy offers me an unforgettable fantasy world to get lost in.
I spent years eagerly anticipating the publication of each new book in the series, and Hogwarts Legacy lets me relive my favorite Harry Potter moments in an all-new way. It lets me put the Sorting Hat on my own head, take a breather in my house’s common room, take a joyride around the castle’s turrets on my own broomstick, and make my own unsanctioned trips to Hogsmeade for a pint of butterbeer.
Image source: Gamesplanet
Yet even without the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, Hogwarts Legacy stands out. Set many long years before the events of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, it provides space for a new generation of fans to create their own stories. For the first time, I can enter this world and choose what kind of witch or wizard I want to be. I can be an ambitious magic wielder ready to seize power at all costs. I can be a tireless explorer, always scanning the horizon as I travel on my broomstick. I can be a relentless puzzle-solver eager to encounter the many mysteries of the castle. It’s all up to me.
Strategic, fast-paced combat
No disrespect to Harry Potter, but the boy only had a small handful of spells that he liked to cast during combat. From the second volume, all the way to his ultimate battle against the dark wizard Voldemort, his go-to spell was the tried-and-true Expelliarmus. Thankfully, Hogwarts Legacy requires me to develop and use a much larger repertoire of spells.
Image source: Gamesplanet
My character has a spammable Basic Cast that does a light amount of damage with an extra kicker when I hit it four times in a row, but it’s the rest of my spellbook that does most of the work when the chips are down. Separate cooldowns for each spell keep me from relying too much on any one in particular. Many enemies shield themselves in battle with a color-coded bubble that protects them against most damage unless I break it using a spell from the correct category. As I cast spells, I build up a resource called “Ancient Magic” that I get to spend on combat-defining moments. It allows me to chuck giant objects at my opponents, slam them into ground, or dispatch them outright.
Several playstyles are possible, depending on talent choices, but I’m quite fond of a control-oriented strategy where I lift enemies into the air with Levioso and batter them with combo after combo while whipping them back and forth across the battlefield. With the right set of moves, I can keep an enemy juggled almost indefinitely.
Image source: Gamesplanet
If that doesn’t sound like the witch or wizard that you’d prefer to play, don’t worry. Hogwarts Legacy gives you many more options. You can channel your inner Death Eater and unleash Unforgivable Curses against your foes. You can turn the fruits of your labors in Potions and Herbology classes into consumables more than capable of turning the tide of battle. And if you prefer to strike from the shadows, the game offers many tools for both sneaking around and knocking your opponents out of commission before they even realize that you’re there.
All told, the combat in Hogwarts Legacy offers a compelling blend of strategy and fast-paced action. It keeps my eyes trained on the battlefield as I anticipate attacks, figure out the right spells to break through enemy defenses, and scan my surroundings for ways to use the environment to my advantage. It gives me a diverse set of tools so that I can decide how best to approach the situation at hand, and it lets me make real decisions about what kind of a magic-wielder I want to be. (And yes, I can cast Expelliarmus, too.)
A feast for the eyes
Hogwarts Legacy offers a rich world ripe for exploration, and it’s also a spectacularly gorgeous game. Nestled in the Scottish Highlands, Hogwarts Castle is surrounded by austere mountains, rustic hamlets, and forbidding ruins, all of which are more than screenshot-worthy, but the castle itself is the star of the show. The Harry Potter movies faithfully brought this edifice to life on the big screen, but there’s nothing quite exploring its rambling hallways and towers on my own.
Image source: Gamesplanet
The building’s endless stairs, balconies, and courtyards offer new vistas at every turn. Light streams in from massive windows, reflecting off the marble floors, suits of armor, and gilt-framed paintings. Students are everywhere, dodging the school’s poltergeist, studying in the library, competing in the dueling club, and trudging off to class. The whimsical nature of the Harry Potter universe means that there’s something fresh and new around every corner.
The game encourages me to explore with a wide variety of puzzles and challenges, each with their own set of rewards. If I follow the flying keys lurking about in odd corners of the castle, I can unlock certain cabinets. A set of mirrors challenges me to find a nearby place showing the exact perspective shown in the surface of the glass. There are Gobstones to find, statues to hunt down, ancient trials left by the legendary wizard Merlin, and much more. Nothing requires me to complete all these tasks, but I typically travel everywhere by foot or by broom so that I can tackle a couple of them along the way to my next checkpoint. There’s a convenient quick-travel mechanism, but it says a lot about the game that I rarely choose to use it.
The ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4070 Ti proves its mettle
The game’s vision of Hogwarts is an incredible achievement that you’ll want to experience in its full glory. For gamers intending to play at 4K with ray tracing, the top-of-the-line NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 offers the absolute best experience. Yet Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t require the most advanced graphics card on the market. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti brings the game to life with high-end graphics horsepower and next-gen features.
If you primarily game on a QHD monitor, the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card will set you up for fluid frame rates in Hogwarts Legacy. On a desktop gaming PC outfitted with this graphics card, the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, and the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, I was able to load up the game at 2560x1440, hit the Ultra preset, and enjoy an average framerate of 142 FPS. This level of performance shows why so many gamers prefer QHD monitors with a high refresh rate — even when you’re playing a brand-new AAA game, you’ll see these kinds of frame rates when you’re using a high-end graphics card. The ROG Strix XG27AQM, for example, pairs a 2560x1440 resolution with a 0.5ms response time (GTG) and a refresh rate that you can overclock all the way up to 270Hz.
Over the years, I’ve learned to trust NVIDIA’s AI-powered technologies to optimize my gaming experience without compromises. Time and time again, I’ve found that DLSS at its Quality preset improves frame rates significantly, all while maintaining extremely high image fidelity. With a 40 Series card, I can toggle Frame Generation to have the graphics card’s Tensor Cores produce entire frames with the magic of AI, all while NVIDIA Reflex ensures a low-latency, responsive experience.
Image source: Gamesplanet
Part of the fun of owning a cutting-edge NVIDIA GPU is access to ray tracing. I unreservedly recommend exploring Hogwarts with ray tracing enabled. The hallways of the castle provide a perfect canvas for experiencing next-gen lighting effects. With ray tracing enabled at its High preset, I still enjoyed smooth gaming visuals at 2560x1440. With an assist from DLSS, my system produced a buttery-smooth 110 FPS average frame rate.
Make your own trip to Hogwarts
Whether you’re a long-time fan of the series or a newcomer ready to hop on your first broomstick, Hogwarts Legacy has plenty to offer. My favorite role-playing games are always the ones that give me a world so rich and detailed that I want to explore every corner, and I can say confidently that it’s been years since a game has pulled me in quite like Hogwarts Legacy has these last few weeks.
To make your stay in Hogwarts one that you’ll never forget, outfit your PC with the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. Armed with technologies exclusive to NVIDIA’s cutting-edge 40-series graphics card family, this GPU is perfectly suited for playing the game at QHD with all the settings dialed up to 11. Pick up one of your own today.
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