Hitman’s ray tracing 3 update is over, with Io Interactive’s cool upgrade getting its title through ray tracing reflections and shadows, along with an upgrade to Nvidia’s DLSS AI – but unfortunately not AMD’s new FSR 2.0. Intel XeSS is expected to get more support, but for now it’s all about RT upgrades, their amazing impact on performance, and how much DLSS can reduce that cost.
When opened, you will be presented with two ray tracing options: ray tracing reflections and ray tracing shadows from the sun. These are binary choices – on/off – but the ray tracing reflections are actually linked to the default reflection quality setting, with the low to high settings controlling the RT quality. The first is the accuracy of the reflections: going from high to medium and then to low gradually reduces the amount of rays released to calculate the reflection. Low quality softens it and adds to the instability of the movement, although it must be said that the medium in this regard is usually very similar to the high when running the native resolution.
Then there is the roughness limit – how far the RT is calculated from the surface roughness. The rougher the surface, the less impact the RT reflection has, so introducing this class is a good way to get some performance back. The effect is subtle in Hitman 3, but the low setting keeps rough surfaces from getting RT reflections, and it gets bigger as you go into the mids and highs.
However, the main difference between the settings is the number of objects being tracked and the complexity of those objects. At a high level, every person and object in the scene is in RT reflections, while the medium makes smart choices in reducing the number and density of objects, resulting in an overall similar effect. Meanwhile, as expected, lower settings remove many objects from reflections, while reflected characters have a lower resolution.
For RT shades, the effect is more limited and is really a simple binary on/off option. Enabling the effect turns the player’s closest sunshade into upgraded and raytracing rewards. However, not every light source receives RT shadows – in fact all artificial light shadows are achieved via standard shadow cards, just like a regular game.
What this all means is that the screen space reflections and background cube maps used in the vanilla game have been upgraded with more realistic alternatives to ray tracing – although the game’s real mirrors are still rendered by rendering on flat surfaces, in fact twice the scene processing – that is The effect is probably more expensive than RT. The reason for this is to maintain an established art style and because these flat reflections can be even higher quality in some respects.
Overall, I’d say the RT reflections help a lot with the presentation in Hitman 3, adding a lot to the many displays in the game, especially indoors where they’re usually visible. Although it is not perfect: it has its own drawbacks in terms of stability and reflections. RT itself uses screen space information aggressively when it can, which usually works very well, but can sometimes lead to interruptions. Despite minor issues like these, RT reflections are almost always an upgrade from previous reflection systems in those regions where they replace them.
However, RT shades have less of an impact on the game’s visuals. It helps with the quality of sunscreens in the usual way you’d expect, and it adds shadows until you get a nice softening so you can even apply it to vegetation, which isn’t a given per se because that’s expensive and complicated in itself. They also offer a close shaved contact shade to emphasize the details, which is nice though. However, RT shadows also have a limited range: after a certain distance, the RT shadows intermingle and instead see shadow maps in place. Unfortunately, these shadow maps are completely unfiltered and look rather rough in comparison.
This is a confusing decision because normal shadow maps are filtered remotely without RT – so there’s a strange scenario where these shadows actually look better with RT turned off. In any case, the cost of using RT’s shadows is somewhat limited compared to mirroring – on the RTX 3080 at 1440p, the gaming benchmark reports a performance in the region of 34 percent, rising to 41 percent on an AMD RX 6800. XT equivalent. However, there is also a 30 percent impact on CPU performance, and as you will discover, RT in general has a huge impact on frame rate, even on the most powerful set.
RT’s reflections are relatively heavy on the GPU, so much so that the RTX 3090 with the low setting at 4K sees 60 percent less performance on the low setting and 67 percent worse on the medium, with 72 percent hitting the top. Always going from 4K at 120 fps to 60 fps is difficult, and as you’ll see in the video on this page, less capable cards with lower resolutions still have a mountain to climb in terms of decent performance, while the gap between hardware devices varies. AMD and Nvidia according to RT load.
Ultimately, for AMD RDNA 2 GPUs, I really only recommend the Low Reflection setting for GPUs from the RX 6800 XT and above… to compensate and there is no FSR 2.0 option for now. Really, I imagine most Radeon users will only pick the shades of RT that are more cost effective than these GPUs. For Nvidia users, I only recommend looking at RTX 3080-tier GPUs with RT Reflections set to Medium, while lower RTX 3070 GPUs choose Low Reflections. Anything less than this performance class isn’t really racing, and I recommend using only the RT shade option. Oh, and by the way, following the recommendations of the Io Interactive spec, I’m only suggesting reflections used in coordination with DLSS – yes, the result was really high.
Even taking those factual recommendations into account, it must be emphasized that RT in Hitman 3 is not only GPU-heavy, but it also has an extraordinary impact on CPU performance, varying from scene to scene. The more complex the scene, the higher the CPU’s hit rate. If there are many NPCs or objects on the screen, the CPU cost will go up. In a scene full of objects and characters, many CPUs will not be able to handle the required processing without dropping frames, even if a GPU with DLSS, for example, has enough power to perform graphical calculations. Again, I’ve found AMD GPU users fared worse here, with higher CPU usage, which seems odd. Due to generally very high CPU requirements, it’s hard to say how many people would realistically want to perform RT reflections, even if your GPU has power, you probably don’t.
Another problem is that implementing DLSS in Hitman 3 can be quite problematic. The static display starts to show off over time – something I’ve seen in Dying Light 2’s pre-release code (fixed by launch) and in Deathloop. In addition, many characters seem to cause smearing issues from mid to far: almost as if characters stop generating motion vectors at some point. In my opinion, this is generally detrimental to DLSS image quality, even if other aspects of DLSS image quality are good.
DLSS performance mode also has some serious issues with noise in ray-tracing reflections – among other stability issues I’ve never seen in other DLSS implementations. Balanced modes and quality are good, but there are definitely issues with the Performance mode. Finally, these issues limit the effectiveness of DLSS – and I hope all of this is addressed comprehensively.
In short, I have mixed reactions to Hitman’s upgrade to ray tracing. I think the reflections are very high quality overall and I think it’s commendable that Io added several levels of quality to reduce at least some of the maximum performance costs. But even at these quality levels, it remains expensive and presents a major challenge for even the most powerful CPUs and GPUs. Shades of RT is less impressive and not transformative, but at least it has a reasonable CPU and GPU performance cost. I imagine most people would opt to use this one instead and see the mirror option as something best left to future PCs.
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