ComputerBase has tested the official DLSS 5 in Hogwarts Legacy, and its advice is to leave it off. On an RTX 5090 at 4K, neural rendering eats almost a quarter of your frames: 75.6 FPS without it, 57.2 FPS with it. The image only changes in a way you would notice in Hogsmeade, and the German site compared the main character's face to an Instagram filter.
Hogwarts Legacy is the second DLSS 5 game after NBA 2K27. The patch landed on November 5; we covered it, and the fuss over faces after the March reveal, in our earlier story. You need any RTX 50 card and driver 616.64 or newer, and you switch it on in Display settings or with Shift+Alt+B.
Hogsmeade looks great, your hero does not
The test ran at 4K with DLSS Quality, maxed settings and all three ray-traced effects (reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion), with Ray Reconstruction bumped to the DLSS 4.5 preset F through the NVIDIA app. The rest of the lighting is plain raster.
In the village, DLSS 5 does what NVIDIA promised. More contrast, believable shading, the usual raster glow gone, and sometimes extra texture detail. Almost everywhere else the difference is small. A couple of times the testers tried to guess whether the effect was on, and guessed wrong.
Avalanche masked the NPCs out, so only their clothes get processed. Your own character is another story: DLSS 5 redraws the whole player model. Hair gets too shiny, the face turns into a magazine-cover look and clashes with everyone else in the game, who are drawn in a different style. Artifacts are rare; a bright fringe around the moving hero showed up just once.
What it costs on an RTX 5090
At 2560x1440 the card is held back by the Ryzen 9 7950X3D (ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 is heavy on the CPU), so DLSS 5 comes cheap: 95.8 FPS against 83.8, about 13 percent. With 4X frame generation it is 302.2 against 256.7.
At 4K the CPU drops out of the picture and the price goes up. 57 FPS without frame generation is just shy of 60: playable, not smooth. 4X frame generation lifts the counter to 179. Oddly, DLSS 5 cost more in NBA 2K27, and ComputerBase could not say why.
Radeon and Arc owners do not get the official version at all, only mods. The Intel Arc port, version 0.0.5 from November 6, added a hogwarts profile that its author says follows the patch's gentler tuning: half the tone shift and softer treatment of skin. It also got a frame counter, and on an Arc 140V at 1280x720 the author saw 25-26 neural frames and 51-52 on screen with frame generation. How to set up the mods on AMD and Intel is in our DLSS 5 guide.
If I had an RTX 5090, I would take a walk through Hogsmeade with DLSS 5 on and then go back to regular DLSS. ComputerBase lands in the same place, only more bluntly.
Sources
ComputerBase: Hogwarts Legacy mit DLSS 5 im Test (November 5, 2026, benchmarks on page two). The site received the game build from NVIDIA in advance under NDA.
DLSS-NR for Intel Arc 0.0.5, release notes, figures from the author.
Cover image: Hogwarts Legacy, Steam store page. DLSS 5 on and off comparison: NVIDIA.
