DirectX 12 is Coming to Hitman 2 – Will this address the game’s CPU woes?

IO Interactive has announced that Hitman 2’s next patch will deliver DirectX 12 support to the PC version of the game, offering support for AMD GCN or newer graphics cards, Intel’s DirectX 12 compliant offerings and Nvidia’s Geforce 900 series or newer graphics cards. 

This patch will hopefully enable PC gamers to play Hitman 2 with higher framerates on PC, as before now the game was known to be CPU limited in a number of areas, most notably in the game’s Mumbai mission. 

At this time, IO Interactive has not revealed how the company is using Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API, though our guess is that the developer plans to use the new API to increase the game’s multi-threading and push past many of the CPU bottlenecks that the game can experience. That said, IO Interactive could also be aiming to boost graphics performance in some areas by using techniques like asynchronous compute. 

Patch 2.20 for Hitman 2 will release on PC later today, bringing with it new content from the game’s Expansion Pass. The game’s Hantu Port location will be added to the game with this update, with the patch weighing in at 1.8GB on PC.