Last month, we announced our partnership with Intel that would help us to provide the best possible performance and optimization for PC players in HITMAN 3.

We’re excited to tell you more about how PC players will experience the game (in fewer than 47 days!) and share details about some of the features you can expect in January 2021 and beyond.

Our Chief Technology Officer, Maurizio De Pascale, recently sat down with Intel Vice-President of Client XPU Product and Solutions, Roger Chandler, to talk about our partnership, the 20 year anniversary of Hitman and more.

Together with Intel, we are working to optimize the game for launch and beyond, with updates, tweaks and improvements coming throughout 2021 that will improve the experience of playing on a high-end PC and multi-core CPUs. Later in 2021, we will also implement Ray Tracing and look forward to sharing more on that next year.

At launch in January 2021, HITMAN 3’s gameplay experience will be fluid and responsive thanks to improvements to interaction animation, where we’ve tightened and optimized across the board. We’ve also added improvements to lighting and reflections that allow us to fully realise the creative vision of where the game will take Agent 47.

A perfect example of this is our recently-revealed Chongqing location, where 47 finds himself on the neon-lit rainy streets. Details such as water effects, rain hitting 47 and his clothes getting wet are all on full display. Take a look for yourself in our “Under The Hood” trailer:

Of course, HITMAN 3 will also support 4K visuals, HDR support and the option for an uncapped framerate. Today, we’d also like to share more PC-specific details on some features that will be available on PC at launch, starting with directional reverb.

“Directional reverb in HITMAN 3 makes the sound that is reflected off walls and obstacles feel like it’s emanating from the general direction of the environment where the sound is located. This will improve a players ability to localize sound in a given space and makes the audio mix cleaner. Without this feature, the reverberated sound would seem to come from all around the player, which is not always accurate.” – Senior Audio Programmer Stepan Boev

And finally, we want to talk about and variable rate shading:

“Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is a new technique that allows us to change the shading rate dynamically. A higher shading rate means more visual fidelity at the expense of performance, while a lower shading rate means more performance at the expense of visual quality. By leveraging VRS, we can prioritize higher shading rates in areas of the frame where it will be more effective and reducing it in areas where it will be difficult to notice. Compared to using a lower resolution to increase framerate, VRS keeps the geometry edges sharp, effectively providing better performance while keeping visual quality high.” – Senior Programmer Bernat Muñoz Garcia

Stay tuned for more HITMAN 3 news coming your way before the end of the year.