Hitman 3 PC: the best settings

Hitman 3 arrived this week in what has become the series’ biggest digital launch of all time – and rightly so. As a culmination of the existing trilogy, Hitman 3 ends the generation with the most impressive iteration of the Glacier Engine to date, with all of the current generation Hitman content upgraded in the latest game, while still being essentially ‘ remastered ” for the next generation consoles. PC owners can also rejoice: the game does everything the PS5 and X Series can and more, thanks to some nice upgrades and increased scalability.

By delivering this article, IO interactive has provided us with the exact PC settings for each console the game is running on. So by using these settings on PC at the right resolution, it is possible to see how a PC GPU behaves compared to consoles, with some interesting observations. First of all, I would like to commend IO for a more comprehensive PC options menu. The lack of granularity in the settings was a real problem I had with Hitman 2, but this has been improved over time and these efforts are carried directly into Hitman 3, allowing high end PC users to increase the fidelity to the quality of the console.

It starts with Shadow Quality, which sees the PS5 running at the normal preset, with the Xbox Series X cranking that up to a high level. Ultra allows PC users to further fine tune the effect and in my testing had very little impact on performance. The ambient occlusion of screen space is interesting, in that all console versions run at the “ minimum ” setting – perhaps not surprising when going from ultra to minimum can add 20%. at frame rate. Minimum might seem a bit rough, and I would say Medium is the optimal setting – you get back 16% of the frame rate by going from maximum and halo artifacts are minimized in the process.

In-depth analysis of Hitman 3 on PC, where to spend your GPU budgets and how everything compares to next-gen consoles.

Screen-to-space reflections are grueling too, with next-gen consoles equivalent to the average PC setting. This is what I would recommend for the optimized settings as well: going high gives you a four percent performance gain and while some grainy artifacts are present it doesn’t distract in most scenes. Another important parameter is the mirror quality – a textured rendering effect that allows the game to draw the same scene from an additional angle. When a mirror dominates the stage, the success of the performance is more noticeable. Here I found an anomaly – IO tells us that the PS5 renders at the mid PC setting, but that doesn’t seem to change the fidelity of the high setting on the PC version when it really should. If the mount is fixed I would recommend this based on the PS5’s display, but for now high settings should do the trick.

Level of detail is the last meaningful parameter you should look at – the higher you set it, the farther away you will find objects. IO fixes new gen consoles at the mid setting, but overall I would recommend the high preset for optimized settings, as I find the pop-in object a bit of a nuisance on mids and bass, and even on consoles. Then there’s the motion blur setting to consider – its impact on performance is only really noticeable if you have fast-moving objects taking up most of the camera view where the top pass. at the bottom produced a maximum of 15% more performance. But it really is an outlier – I recommend you tailor it to whatever you think is best for you. For the record, the consoles disable it.

From there we move on to other PC-exclusive settings, with simulation quality. There are two options here – basic and better, all consoles using the latter in order to reduce the CPU load. By going with the basic setup, distant NPCs work effectively part time and other functionality is changed as well. To be honest, only NPCs were visible to me. IO recommends the base option for those with quad-core processors and to be honest I would go for the best. It worked great for me on a Ryzen 5 3600 – the current champion mainstream processor.

Our video also includes a review on which PC GPUs best match the PS5 and X-series – the RX 5700 XT looks pretty close here …

The final option is variable rate shading – which appears to be the least impressive Layer 1 implementation supported by Intel integrated GPUs, and applies to objects in the scene rather than the perceptual similarity of the color or speed of movement found in VRS level 2 variants. seen in titles like Gears 5 or the Wolfenstein games. Two options are present – quality and performance – and I cannot recommend the last one, which has a noticeable impact on the overall quality. If your GPU supports VRS, there is a 3% frame rate gain using quality mode, based on the game benchmark analysis.

Overall, looking at our optimized settings, they are similar to the compromises made on consoles like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, but they are deliberately set higher in areas where I think quality can be achieved without too many difficulties. significant performance degradation. Running at optimized settings from max in the benchmark gives you a 17% performance advantage and the game looks essentially the same in most scenarios. You’ll see in the video how it all plays out on a range of Nvidia and AMD GPUs, but I was also impressed with the CPU performance.

With Hitman 3, DX12 is the standard and the DX11 renderer is deprecated, which ensures better CPU performance. I tested a scene that turned out to be particularly CPU heavy in Hitman 2 and found that even the mainstream Ryzen 5 3600 performed wonderfully – and even the lowest frame rates were in the years 80. In terms of percentages, the Ryzen 9 3900X performed around 17% better than the 3600, and the Intel Core i9 10900K offered a 32% advantage.

Our full perspective on Hitman 3 in Digital Foundry’s tech review.

Knowing that we could get an exact match for the console settings via IO support, I thought it might be interesting to see how PC GPUs stack up against PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X using a Hitman 2 Miami scene stress test case – one of the only places you’ll find a drop below 60 fps on PS5. You can find my full operation in the video at the top of this page, but it might not be too surprising that AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 XT offers the closest match to Sony’s new machine. It has four more Navi dual compute units than the PS5, but runs at a slower clock. I had fun with this, and comparisons to the X series at 4K resolution are also interesting, but I expect memory bandwidth to play a big role in the result depending on what is rendered, as the oversizing of particles is the most obvious challenge presented by the scene.

All in all, the PC version of Hitman 3 is great – it looks and performs well, and I hope to see more improvements to this version over time. In particular, I can’t wait to see what kind of ray tracing might be added in the future – the current screen space reflections are good, but a number of levels in Hitman 3 really seem like they could benefit from it. full-fledged RT alternatives. . It would also be great to see how DLSS performed on the Glacier Engine. Typically, Nvidia’s AI scaling produces “ better than native ” picture quality on games with heavy TAA and post-processing, so I’d be interested to see how that works out. would happen on a more precise and pristine title like this one. Hopefully we will see this in the future, but for now Hitman 3 on PC comes highly recommended.