In most cases, the black screen eventually goes away after a few minutes. Therefore, you should start off by waiting for a few minutes to see if the black screen disappears. However, if the black screen is prevalent, you can use the various methods that we will mention below to get rid of the issue.
1. Disable AMD/NVIDIA Overlay
The first thing you should do when starting to troubleshoot the black screen is to disable in-game overlays of the software accompanied by your graphics driver. This includes the in-game overlay of NVIDIA GeForce Experience of AMD Radeon in the case of AMD graphics cards. These overlays inject files in order to present the in-game overlay which interferes with the game process and can cause various issues, which can result in the game crashing, and more. Follow the instructions below for your respective software to turn off the in-game overlay.
GeForce Experience
AMD Radeon
2. Disable Shader Pipeline Cache
Pipeline cache is a concept in Unreal Engine 5 that allows developers to control the shader precompilation and reduce stutters. The black screen in Hogwarts Legacy could be due to the pipeline cache enabled which allows the cache to load existing data from your disk and precompile it. You can mitigate the black screen in Hogwarts legacy by disabling the shader pipeline cache via the game config file on your computer. This can be done via the r.ShaderPipelineCache.Enabled variable. Follow the instructions below to do this:
3. Disable Ray Tracing
Ray Tracing technology is being adopted in all modern games due to its capabilities and advantages. Upscaling is a common aspect used by most games to improve the graphics of the game without compromising the performance of the game by a lot. In some instances, the game can be presenting a black screen due to the Ray Tracing capabilities of your graphics card. This can occur due to the graphics drivers installed on your system or a general bug with the game which needs to be resolved by the developers. Meanwhile, you can circumvent the issue by disabling ray tracing in the game. You will have to do this manually via the config file. Follow the instructions below:
4. Verify Game Files
The black screen issue can also occur due to missing or corrupted game files on your system. In such a scenario, you will have to use the scan and repair feature on your respective platform to resolve the issue. This can be done quite easily on both Steam and the Epic Games Launcher. The clients will scan your game files for any discrepancies and download new files in case of an issue. Follow the instructions below for your respective platform to do this.
Steam
Epic Games Launcher
5. Reinstall Graphics Drivers
Finally, if none of the above methods resolves the issue for you, it is likely the black screen is occurring due to the graphics drivers installed on your computer. Games rely heavily on graphics drivers since they are used to communicate with the graphics card installed on your motherboard. In such a scenario, you will have to uninstall the graphics drivers using a third-party utility like Display Driver Uninstaller and perform a fresh installation. DDU will remove all traces of the current graphics driver from your computer which will allow you to do a fresh install of the latest version available. Follow the instructions below to do this:
