After the Year 2 announcement video, I was left unclear on the release of the ray tracing element. I’ve also seen several conflicting articles online.
Is anyone able to confirm if ray tracing is coming on January 20th? Or if that is just the Elusive Target Arcade? Is there a solid release date for ray tracing? Sorry if this has been discussed already, I couldn’t find the information in the forum. Thanks.
I’m fairly certain ray tracing is coming on the 20th.
https://www.ioi.dk/hitman-3-year-2-reveal/
One of the most notable enhancements to the game will be the option to enable Ray Tracing on PC later this year. With better reflections and better shadows, our locations are going to look better than ever.
I bet this means ray tracing will not come on 20th of January
You may be right. Best I just don’t get my hopes up. Between this and The Witcher 3 update, I’ll be enjoying both like new again when the feature is out.
You’ll enjoy it, but your graphics card will be screaming 
Jokes aside, I hope it’ll be fairly optimised once it’s out though.
Damn, that’s a shame.
According to Intel, Hitman 3 PC’s next-generation game update, which will include super-resolution and ray tracing, will be released for Q12022 in conjunction with the Intel Arc Alchemist discrete GPU series.
Intel is building new open standards for Ray Tracing and Super Resolution (XeSS) available on wide range of hardware, all of that coming in 2022.
Edit :
Yeah I am waiting on my new build arriving. Ryzen 9 5900x and a RTX 3080ti. Step up from the 1080ti I have currently.
If you look in CurrentUser/Software/IO Interactive/Hitman 3
And you’ll see entries with the prefix “RT”
They don’t do anything at the moment sadly.
Sad to see there is still no update on this, unless I missed it?
I’m genuinly hyped for this as well. Will it only be reflections, or shadows as well?
No update yet on this…
Raytracing was pinned to be added to Hitman 3 “later in 2022”. How soon that later will be is yet to be seen. I’d hope it’s by Summer 2022 – pretty sure IOI mentioned wanting to get RT in hitman since before launch.
not that it really matters to me, since I don’t have a raytracing device
I think between RT in HItman III and the next gen upgrades for the last few Resident Evil games, this year is destined to be replaying old games.
Intel Arc Alchemist discrete GPU series has been delayed to Q2-2022, and consequently Hitman 3 PC’s next-generation game update too (CPU optimizations, super-resolution and ray tracing). The two are more tied than people think, Intel needs games to promote their work on both open and proprietary cutting-edge technologies, and both Hitman 3 and Death Stranding Director’s Cut on PC are used in this perspective.
Reflections and shadows, this is what they have announced for the moment.
I’m really looking forward Reflections, it will be interesting to see Glacier’s (IOI in-house Engine) implementation, because it’s not the easiest RT feature to handle in terms of performance and rendering. Glacier already uses Ray Tracing for some audio features since Hitman 2 according to IOI’s lead sound engineer.
Does shadows include light aswell? So better light inside a house?
IO (Alessandro Dal Corso) and Intel (Leigh Davies) will present at GDC on March 21 and 24 their work on Ray Tracing and XeSS implementation in Hitman 3. It will be interesting to see the slides when they come out.
In this talk, Alessandro Dal Corso presents challenges and details of implementing ray tracing in HITMAN 3. The talk showcases two main techniques, ray traced reflections and sun shadows at different quality levels.
The presentation first covers adapting a rasterization-based engine into doing ray tracing work. Then, it continues on how to efficiently generate intermediate vertex buffers and build bottom level accelerations, both for simple and complex geometry. It provides details on how to adapt a complex node-based material system to work as ray tracing shaders.
The talk finally present and implementation of ray traced sun shadows, with improvements in penumbra and contact hardening. It also discusses some of the scheduling challenges that ray traced shadows bring in running them together with the reflections.
An overview of the work done to support Intel’s 12th Generation processors and Alchemist video cards in Hitman 3, includes the core Ray tracing work to bring higher quality reflection and shadows to the Hitman world and performance optimization for 12th Generation Intel processor and the integration of XeSS to provide improved quality and performance at high resolutions.
An overview of the Engine requirements to add Ray Tracing, Optimizations on large scale game environments. An introduction to Intel XeSS upscaling solution and its integration requirements.
Other Intel’s sessions at GDC 2022 :
So glad I exceed the recommended. Hopefully still able to have it maxed out.
