Hogwarts Legacy crashes on start up (FIXED)

[Smart Like Rock]

So this is an issue that just started for me and I cannot figure this out. I have put about 50 hours into the game, and I was playing last night just fine. I woke up this morning and tried to launch the game. When I first started it wouldn’t even launch. Eventually I got the game to launch, however when the game transitions from the seizure warning to the splash screens, the game flickers and shows a blue screen for a split second, skips the splash screens and goes straight to the preparing shaders screen and then immediately crashes. I’ve tried everything from deleting saves to reinstalling the entire game and everything in between. If anyone has any recommendations that would be much appreciated. I’ve tried everything i can think of and find, to no avail. So I’m willing to try anything.

[Ultrachris2k]

So i have just battled through this same that you and a lot of people seem to be experiencing with this game now on my girlfriends pc and i think the solution i found for her might help some people especially after reading some of the insane things that people are suggesting as solutions.

So try this. Open file explorer and open your C: drive. click the view tab at the top and enable that it will show hidden files. Next open the programdata folder that would otherwise have been hidden and then open the Hogwarts Legacy folder. there should be a few files located in this folder that were created when the game was run for the first time and you should have seen this progress bar that might have taken a while to complete that said "Creating shader renderers" or something along those lines. Next create a new folder within the Hogwarts Legacy folder and name the folder Temp. Now drag all of the files within the Hogwarts Legacy folder into the newly created Temp folder so that it is the only item left. Now if you start the game again it should force the game to recreate the shader renderer files because it cannot find the old ones which are now in the Temp folder. I suppose you could just delete the existing ones but i do not know what problems you might run into and i dont want to suggest to everyone that they go around randomly deleting a bunch of files blindly and cause chaos etc. If the fix that i am suggesting causes any kind of error etc you can easily reverse what was done by moving the files within the temp folder and put them back into their original Hogwarts Legacy folder. This was the only thing that worked for my girlfriends PC. The problem could have something to do with the game creating the shader renderers while the pc was running a specific GPU driver version, and then if you update your drivers those renderers bug out or whatever and need to then be recreated with the new GPU drivers installed. This is what the series of events was for me, hope that maybe it helps someone else

Cheers

[theodod]

If nothing works it may be related to this, https://hogwartslegacy.bugs.wbgames.com/bug/HL-482.

[🜏]

I can confirm this same problem. My game crashes with a memory allocation failure at just under the 11gb of ram.

[Smart Like Rock]

I fixed the problem. I just had to reinstall windows...

[Smart Like Rock]

Originally posted by Ultrachris2k:

So i have just battled through this same that you and a lot of people seem to be experiencing with this game now on my girlfriends pc and i think the solution i found for her might help some people especially after reading some of the insane things that people are suggesting as solutions.

So try this. Open file explorer and open your C: drive. click the view tab at the top and enable that it will show hidden files. Next open the programdata folder that would otherwise have been hidden and then open the Hogwarts Legacy folder. there should be a few files located in this folder that were created when the game was run for the first time and you should have seen this progress bar that might have taken a while to complete that said "Creating shader renderers" or something along those lines. Next create a new folder within the Hogwarts Legacy folder and name the folder Temp. Now drag all of the files within the Hogwarts Legacy folder into the newly created Temp folder so that it is the only item left. Now if you start the game again it should force the game to recreate the shader renderer files because it cannot find the old ones which are now in the Temp folder. I suppose you could just delete the existing ones but i do not know what problems you might run into and i dont want to suggest to everyone that they go around randomly deleting a bunch of files blindly and cause chaos etc. If the fix that i am suggesting causes any kind of error etc you can easily reverse what was done by moving the files within the temp folder and put them back into their original Hogwarts Legacy folder. This was the only thing that worked for my girlfriends PC. The problem could have something to do with the game creating the shader renderers while the pc was running a specific GPU driver version, and then if you update your drivers those renderers bug out or whatever and need to then be recreated with the new GPU drivers installed. This is what the series of events was for me, hope that maybe it helps someone else

Cheers

I dont know if this would have worked because i just reinstalled windows after a few hours, but im curious to see if this will work for someone so thank you for your advice

[vL7.]

Originally posted by Ultrachris2k:

So i have just battled through this same that you and a lot of people seem to be experiencing with this game now on my girlfriends pc and i think the solution i found for her might help some people especially after reading some of the insane things that people are suggesting as solutions.

So try this. Open file explorer and open your C: drive. click the view tab at the top and enable that it will show hidden files. Next open the programdata folder that would otherwise have been hidden and then open the Hogwarts Legacy folder. there should be a few files located in this folder that were created when the game was run for the first time and you should have seen this progress bar that might have taken a while to complete that said "Creating shader renderers" or something along those lines. Next create a new folder within the Hogwarts Legacy folder and name the folder Temp. Now drag all of the files within the Hogwarts Legacy folder into the newly created Temp folder so that it is the only item left. Now if you start the game again it should force the game to recreate the shader renderer files because it cannot find the old ones which are now in the Temp folder. I suppose you could just delete the existing ones but i do not know what problems you might run into and i dont want to suggest to everyone that they go around randomly deleting a bunch of files blindly and cause chaos etc. If the fix that i am suggesting causes any kind of error etc you can easily reverse what was done by moving the files within the temp folder and put them back into their original Hogwarts Legacy folder. This was the only thing that worked for my girlfriends PC. The problem could have something to do with the game creating the shader renderers while the pc was running a specific GPU driver version, and then if you update your drivers those renderers bug out or whatever and need to then be recreated with the new GPU drivers installed. This is what the series of events was for me, hope that maybe it helps someone else

Cheers

It didn't work here, the game keeps closing.. :(

[tome]

Hey, i had instant CTD, or a blank non responding screen, not being able to play.

I went into Nvidia Control Panel just messing around; I turned Off the setting called "Optimize for Compute Performance" and weirdly enough the game launched without a crash.

I tried it multiple times replicating it, turning it on and off again just to make sure that this setting was the culprit; surely enough, with it On it crashed, with it Off it launched.

Just leaving this comment here for anyone happen to get the same problem.

[Luke Himself]

This exact scenario just happened to me after not playing the game since before I updated my graphics drivers..
The furthest I could get the game was for a second on the "Preparing Shaders" screen, after 4 crashes I found this workaround.
It 100% worked, rebuilt shaders, back to normal.
I guess this will be for every driver update.
AMD GPU, btw.

[Ultrachris2k]

Originally posted by Luke Himself:

This exact scenario just happened to me after not playing the game since before I updated my graphics drivers..
The furthest I could get the game was for a second on the "Preparing Shaders" screen, after 4 crashes I found this workaround.
It 100% worked, rebuilt shaders, back to normal.
I guess this will be for every driver update.
AMD GPU, btw.

Glad it helped. figuring out my issue was an infuriating pain so im happy that this helped!

[TheLegionDragon]

Originally posted by Ultrachris2k:

< Wall of Text Removed >

My guy, take all of the points I can give right now. This has been bugging me for a significant portion now, unable to figure out why or how, but this fix genuinely worked for me. Posting it here in 2024 so it hopefully shows up when you search "hogwarts legacy crashes on startup" or "hogwarts legacy startup crash" so that people can try this solution. Once again, thank you SO very much!

[Ultrachris2k]

Originally posted by TheLegionDragon:

Originally posted by Ultrachris2k:

< Wall of Text Removed >

My guy, take all of the points I can give right now. This has been bugging me for a significant portion now, unable to figure out why or how, but this fix genuinely worked for me. Posting it here in 2024 so it hopefully shows up when you search "hogwarts legacy crashes on startup" or "hogwarts legacy startup crash" so that people can try this solution. Once again, thank you SO very much!

My pleasure dude. Glad i could help!