The HITMAN PC beta has gone live yesterday on Steam and we've taken it for a spin. Here's a bunch of screenshots taken at 4K resolution with maxed settings (with the notable exception of antialiasing, since it isn't really needed at 3840x2160).
HITMAN looks very nice at 4K, as you can see from the screenshots. Certain reflections on surfaces particularly stand out in the very brief opening scene, though ultimately HITMAN doesn't quite manage to compete with Rise of the Tomb Raider or Tom Clancy's The Division from a graphics standpoint; one thing that's noticeably missing is any HBAO derived Ambient Occlusion technique, with the surpassed SSAO being the only option.
Unfortunately, with our test configuration (i7 3770, 16GB RAM, 980Ti SLI) the performance is quite disappointing presently. As you can see in the gameplay video below, in crowded areas such as the yacht level the frame rate tanks even below 30FPS, which makes it barely playable.
While this is of course still a beta, HITMAN is due for release in just over two weeks (on March 8). It's likely that SLI support isn't optimized yet, especially since this game has been mostly optimized for AMD hardware; a driver release could do wonders, but that's not the only improvement we might see.
We know that HITMAN is set to feature DirectX 12 support, which will be detailed extensively during a GDC 2016 talk by IO Interactive's Lead Render Programmer Jonas Meyer, but there is no way to enable DirectX 12 in this beta. Hopefully it will bring a decent performance boost across the board.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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