Evening and night levels really look dimmer and more contrasting even compared to Hitman 2.
One day I decided to compare the low graphics settings with the ultra settings in Hitman 2. I had a hard time seeing the difference. But the difference in FPS was palpable. For me, this was an example of good optimization. The game looked about the same on all graphics settings
Now I compare the last two games on ultra settings and clearly see the difference in quality. I will hope that this is just a bug that arose from optimizing the client size
I think H2/3ās lighting in those shots looks incredibly better, as it does across the board, but I know many disagree. Some like theā¦ flatter, I guess?.. look of the original.
Overall, I prefer HItman 2/3 over 1 any day, and so Hitman 3 over 2, as they reduced some of the terrible blur at some levels. Its just the level of detail that upsets me. But overall, they look way better.
Recently installed Hitman 1 again just to test things out and it is seriously as poorly optimised as I remember. My 2080ti dips in some places below 60 fps which is crazy.
Tried switching to Direct 3D 12 and that stutters randomly every now and again. Never had a single dip in Hitman 2 and 3. They really improved optimisation as the games went on.
I remember when the reviews came out for the first game in 2016 and the poor optimisation as well as all the online required stuff was really badly affecting itās rating. It was rated on average as like a 6 or 7 at the time rather than the 9+ it actually is.
This and the global stability on PC. Hitman 1 was decent enought, Hitman 2 used to be very unstable with Turing GPU between november and march, multiple Nvidia breaking drivers, some issues for Pascal GPU too mid-2019. Game also crashed under certain conditions in relation to audio devices. They also had the bad idea to add Razer Chroma, yet it was known to be a really bad third party tool (Id Software pulled this out of Doom Eternal after Doom 2016 debacle). Luckily, IO took that shit out in the third game.
They did a good job, cleaned up their base code and removed the useless / outdated things.
Hope they can keep the bar high. No need to rush the Ray Tracing implementation, take your time IO.
I really really really REALLY miss the H2016 protest atmosphere in Marrakesh. It was graphically butchered in Hitman 2 already, but I was hoping for a slight re-upgrade in Hitman 3. To no avail.
A lot of these changes are cosmetic decisions, but I think several of them like that smoke are related to keeping the baseline processor demand lower, to avoid the very framerate issues in Hitman 2016 that @jimmyoneshot just mentioned above. I know the steam in Orsonās shower in Hawkeās Bay is one of the very few things left in Hitman 3ās version of the game that gives me a random framerate drop out of nowhere, and thatās a āsmokeā cloud too.
Iām hoping stuff like Whittleton Creekās grass is something they āfixā in a patch, but it wouldnāt surprise me if it was done to prevent fps instability on older processors or whatever, same as that smoke.
It is unlikely that the owners of older CPUs play at ultra settings. I would understand their logic if they reduced the effects of smoke on high, medium and low settings. But in this case, this is exactly downgrade, not optimization.
I donāt know what that smoke looked like on low, but very often low settings canāt help with certain things that put demand on the processor or a specific ability of a GPU. Crowd sizes for example, in Hitman 3 the ābestā simulation quality now has less people and flags in the stands in Miami than it did in Hitman 2. Thatās surely an optimization, not some random artistic decision to have a smaller crowd.
I would guess a lot of these optimizations were focused on consoles as well, now that they have 60fps modes, and those optimizations were just carried over to the PC build as a matter of consistency. Cyberpunk recently did this as well, downgrading the graphics on PC after launch because of optimizations focused on the broken console versions.
This thread made me download and load up Hitman 2 again to finally compare them back to back, and I gotta say outside of the LOD issues Hitman 3 looks a lot better overall. I thought H3 had more post-processing, but hindsight is 20/20 and H2 actually looks more smudged and artificially sharpened. The lighting is also better across the board I think, not just the volumetric effects.
Hopefully the LOD issue is something they fix, but other than that I loaded up H2 again and played a few maps and was like āohā¦ this isnāt as good as I remembered.ā
