Hitman 3

Hitman 3 is a game developed and published by IO Interactive on 20th of January 2021. The game launched on eight hardware platforms and several streaming services simultaneously.

The game is made on the latest iteration of IO Interactive proprietary Glacier 2 engine. Key new engine features in Hitman 3 include:


 * A switch to using DirectX 12 as an exclusive graphics API on PC.
 * Addition of screen space reflections (SSR).
 * Addition of variable rate shading (VRS; Tier 1).
 * Ray tracing is promised to be added to both PC and consoles with a future update over the course of 2021.

The game provides the option of playing all missions from Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2 by downloading them as DLC. These old missions have received a number of visual updates provided by the new version of Glacier 2 engine.

PC performance benchmarks
The game has a built-in benchmarking tool which can be used to assess performance of either GPU or CPU as it has two different benchmarking sequences targeting either CPU or GPU limitations.

The tool seem to produce results which are somewhat representative of the in game performance.

Benchmarks done with the built-in tool should be comparable between different systems.

Key performance takeaways

 * The game is not overly demanding and can be run on old or slow PC hardware.
 * The game reach >200 fps on high end PCs and is capable of reaching 60 fps on lower mid range systems at the moment of launch.
 * The game CPU code is heavily parallelized and is capable of using at least 32 CPU threads.
 * VRAM consumption is kept below 5GB in 3840x2160 (4K).
 * Launch version VRS implementation is mostly useless as it provides very little performance gain or lead to a significant image quality degradation.
 * The game doesn't benefit from Resizable BAR support (AMD Smart Memory Access).
 * AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1 driver improved the game performance on Radeon GPUs by a margin of up to 10%.
 * As a result the game runs slightly better on AMD GPUs at the moment of this driver release.

Main console versions characteristics

 * The game has a static resolution on all console platforms.
 * The game manages to keep its framerate targets for the majority of gameplay.
 * PS4 can run with unlocked framerate but it never hits 60 and stays in 30-50 range mostly.
 * Shadow quality differ between console platforms from low to high.
 * Texture quality differ between console platforms from medium to ultra.