Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today we're looking at hitman 2 on PC once again following on from Steve's video covering GPU performance on Sunday in this video as was the case with our previous game optimization videos I'll be covering every graphics settings found in hitman 2 showing you how each setting stacks up visually as well as how each setting impacts performance this will give you guys a good idea of what settings you should be using when playing the game in terms of graphics settings there's well there's not really a lot to play with here in hitman 2 when the game launched there were just 5 tweakable settings plus the usual sliders for super sampling and resolution and then with the launch of a patch yesterday IO Interactive added in a sixth setting for tweaking simulation quality as Steve showed in his GPU benchmark the game is pretty well optimized if you're using ultra settings with cars like the GTX 970 sufficing for 1080p 60fps gameplay it also looks great at least in my opinion when you're playing on these settings especially in terms of environment density lighting quality and some of the reflection effects at the same time though the limited selection of graphics options may make it difficult for those with entry-level systems to get the game running well this is something I'll talk about after we go through all the settings because a game might be nice and optimized using the ultra settings but if there's not much room in terms of scaling there is still going to be gamers that will suffer in any case all testing you see in this video was conducted with a range of high-end and mid-range cuts from both AMD and NVIDIA so the results you see here should apply to most gamers though on that as we go where performance may differ for those with lower end hardware also I did test using my core i7 8700 K test system overclocked to 4.9 gigahertz with 16 gigabytes of Corsair Vengeance ddr4 memory and this game is reasonably demanding on the CPU so those with weaker processes may need to turn down a few things and again I'll talk about those specific settings that said at least for our testing we were entirely GPU bound all footage in this video was captured at 4k using a GeForce r-tx 2080 so for the best quality we recommend watching the video using you oops 4k settings sometimes it's hard to spot the differences if you aren't watching above 1080p on YouTube we also have provided a source quality download for our patreon links to that in the description final few notes all the benchmark data was collected using a single benchmark run so the footage you see for the visual comparisons doesn't always correspond directly to the performance data however I tested using the initial cut scene for the Miami main story mission this real-time rendered cutscene moves through a lot of locations quickly and highlights most of the game's graphical effects in a short period of time so it was ideal for this sort of testing perhaps the strangest thing about hitman two's graphical options is a lack of presets you simply have these six graphics options and it's left up to you to choose which setting you want that made my job a bit easier for this video but still it might have been nice to include some presets for everyday uses that might not be as familiar with settings tweaks anyway we'll start here with the level of detail setting which controls the quality of models model draw distance foliage draw distance and a number of other related elements in a lot of scenes the difference between the four modes is subtle you really need to step into a larger area to see the effects of draw distance changes in action throughout most of the levels are tested there's not a huge difference between Ultra and high especially in indoor areas with medium model quality starts to fall away and draw distance for elements like grass moves closer to the camera while with the low setting these aspects really fall away and the lack of grass density makes the ground look flat in some areas when looking at performance you'll gain about 2% moving from Ultra to high which I think for most users is going to be a good trade-off it's a small improvement but the visual quality difference is barely noticeable for those on more constraint systems I dropped to the medium setting here you'll pick up 6% to performance compared to ultra-low does give a sizeable boost to 1% lower performance but considering the quality drop and the lack of an improvement to average frame rates it's not a setting I'd recommend texture quality is a straightforward setting in most games and that's no exception with hitman 2 the texture work in this game is excellent across most elements especially at 4k and with the high setting you're getting the sharpest textures at this resolution dropping to normal only provides a small in texture clarity most noticeable on ground textures and I suspect the difference would be hard to spot when playing on a 1080p display mode basically blows out all textures and looks like garbage it's not a setting I'd recommend for most gamers in terms of performance I recommend keeping textures on high unless you're playing with a VRAM constrained card at higher resolutions there simply isn't much of a performance hit switch intermedium concering low only provides a 2% junk to performance for a massive loss in quality on a non vram restricted GPU again I wouldn't bother with it texture filtering has a noticeable impact to the clarity of textures so if you're using the high texture setting you'll want to use the maximum 16 times anisotropic mode here anisotropic modes 16x through to 4x only have very small almost imperceptible changes to clarity it's only when you drop to 2x that quality begins to fall away noticeably then using the basic trilinear mode well that significantly hurts texture quality so I wouldn't recommend using it unless you're also using low textures which means you're probably on a seriously low-end system like with an isotropic filtering in most games the performance impact across the top three modes is basically zero except the some games to 1% low performance if you're experiencing unpleasant stuttering in some areas I consider lowering the setting to 4x but for most users 16x makes the most sense only if you have an entry-level card should you experiment with two times an isotropic filtering and maybe even trilinear filtering depending on the performance you getting SSAO or screen space ambient occlusion is the setting that has the largest performance impact in the game there's only two settings on or off and it seems that the glacier engine uses a fairly taxing implementation of this technology the effect certainly looks good it delivers self shadowing across most elements in the game world and that provides depth and realism but it's not an enormous change to the lighting system certainly not on the same level as a regular shadow quality when you look at the performance impact it's pretty clear that those on performance constraint systems should disable SSAO as the first port of call to gain around 12% to average frame rates and nearly 20 percent to 1 percent low performance yeah the game will look worse and if you're already achieving 60fps with ssao enabled I'd still leave it enabled but for mid-range gamers who aren't quite hitting 60fps this single set might tip you over the edge for unnoticeable but not significant hit two visuals I am a little curious as to what this engine is doing with SSAO that delivers such a huge performance hit when enabled it is one of the higher cost effects in most games but a typical performance improvement from disabling the effect it's around the five percent marks sometimes up to ten percent maybe a revision to the game engine could improve this a little bit in hitman - shadow quality effects shadow resolution primarily the ultra setting has the sharpest shadows hi is still pretty good medium is where you start to see a loss in sharpness and the low setting significantly blurs and pixel eights the edges of shadows this shadow resolution quality applies to both near and far shadows while hitman 2 does drop shadow quality for further away shadows ultra still delivers higher resolution of far shadows than medium for example but it doesn't extend the distance to which you get the highest quality near shadows this is especially noticeable when looking at crowd shadows each member of the crowd only gets an individual shadow when you're close to them if you step back maybe 10 meters those shadows disappear entirely so what are the performance improving tricks the game implements is to use no fire shadows for crowd members however the point at which these shadows pop in is going to be identical for the ultra and low shadow modes in terms of performance there's not much difference between ultra and high and then there's also not much difference between medium and low but you will get a 2% improvement to performance from switching from ultra down to medium for most gamers I'd recommend sticking with ultra only on entry-level systems is it worth dropping down to medium to get that small performance improvement the final and most recently introduced setting is simulation quality and this is the only setting that requires a full restart of the game to change IO Interactive says this setting improves the amount and fidelity of crowds cloth destruction and particle systems depending on your CPU they recommend using the base mode on quad-core CPUs the better mode on 6 core CPUs and the best mode if you have eight cause despite this advice the game runs fine on the six core 8700 K with the best mode I actually found it quite hard to distinguish between all three modes in most areas of the maps where this quality setting is set have an impact crowd density is one of the most striking elements to hitman 2 but luckily even on the base mode you're still going to be getting great crowd density but there are some areas where elements are removed on settings below best for example here you see a section of simulated flags removed using the better mode compared to best and then even more flags are removed on the base mode it does depend on the area but best has the highest density game world in terms of performance you won't see a big impact to average frame rates between the 3 modes however 1% lower performance which in this game is more CPU dependent does improve by up to 10% moving from best to base if you are struggling with FPS drops in crowd dense areas or you have a lower end CPU it might be best experimenting with the base mode just to drop the density of some world areas so all up there's not a lot of recommendations to make here purely because there Arnel have settings in hitman two my advice for most gamers consuming the performance using ultra settings is just to stick to the highest settings if you want a bit more performance the first thing you know change is turning off SSAO after that shifting level of detail down to high or medium would be advised I'd only mess around with texture quality texture filtering and shadow quality on entry level system struggling for performance similarly CPU banned gamers might find a bit of relief with the base simulation quality setting the good news is the ultra settings themselves after the most part well optimised so if you have a mid-range system you'll likely be playing at least at 1080p 60fps on average for a game with great graphics like this that's a good result none of the settings deliver stupid performance penalties for no uplifting graphical quality everything is well balanced though I guess perhaps I would like a less taxing SSA implementation if that's possible but the same time there's very little scope for improving frame rates on lower and Hardware when switching from everything on the high settings to everything on the lowest settings we only saw a 26% improvement to average frame rates and a 31% improvement to 1% lows on entry-level hardware you'll see up to an additional 10% at best so maybe up to around the 35 percent improvement mark going from maximum to minimum quality this puts hitman 2 in an interesting position it's one of those games where if you can run it you're probably going to be running it pretty well as we've mentioned before 1080p 60 FPS on something like an i9 390 using ultra settings is about right but if you're not getting good performance it's unlikely you'd be able to do much about it take the gtx 1050 2 gigabyte for example which is hovering around 30 FPS using ultra settings at 1080p there's not much you can do to make this game close to a 60 FPS experience chuck everything too low and in a best-case scenario you're looking at a frame rate in the low 40s other games like battlefield 5 for example provide almost double the performance gain that hitman 2 does when comparing the minimum coil settings to ultra this brings lower-end or older cards into play in a way that hitman two dozen battlefield 5 also delivers great visual quality using the ultra preset and it's well optimized at the high end but unlike hitman two it also scales down well thanks to its larger range of quality options with it man to is narrow scope for performance scaling it makes it hard to call the game well optimized overall it's really only well optimised if you have decent GPU resources to begin with it's not an assassin's creed Odyssey type situation for those with newer systems it actually runs pretty well but if your hardware isn't as new or isn't as high-end hitman 2 could be a punishing game to run before closing this one out I want to make special mention of the reflections in this game hitman two manages to use real reflections for many of its surfaces including shiny floors and mirrors without needing to use ray tracing this scene here for example runs at 60fps at 4k on an RT X 2080 yet the floor is a true reflection not a screen spaced reflection mirrors as well our true reflections and there's some cool gameplay mechanics in the game that make use of that fact had hit meant to gone down the DX r or RT X path for reflections I absolutely would not be able to play the game at 4k on an RT X 2080 so we're just going to show that you don't really need ray tracing for reflections in some games that's it for this one I'm actually really excited to play hitman 2 because the first one was awesome and this newer version seems to have even more crazy mechanics to play with it's disappointing the game doesn't seem to be selling well but hopefully over time people will come and play this because it's certainly as a lot of fun subscribe for more game optimization videos like this for that 76 is up next the one have been trading for a few weeks now because it is supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams I'll catch you in the next one