Hitman 3 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

1440p Performance

For our Hitman 3 GPU tests, we did not utilise the game’s built-in benchmark. While the benchmark is highly repeatable and relatively accurate, we found that the start of the game’s Germany mission offered performance levels that were most representative of a worst-case scenario for today’s graphics cards. 

To benchmark this scene, we walked Agent 47 to the forest and towards the power plant and start a short cutscene. This quick benchmark lasts 60 seconds and highlights a spread of framerates throughout most of the Hitman 3. 1st percentile framerates are lower than most areas of the full game, but average and 95th percentile framerates are relatively representative of substantial portions of Hitman 3.   

(The exact settings for out  Low, Medium, High and Ultra presets below are detailed on page 4 of this analysis)  

At 1440p, Hitman 3 can be difficult to keep at 60 FPS framerates with older hardware. That said, GPUs like the GTX 1080 Ti and RX 5700 can do this throughout the majority of the game. Beyond that, GPUs like the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RTX 2060 can achieve a 60 FPS framerate target with only a few lowered graphical settings. Again, SSAO, Shadow Quality and Screen-Space Reflections are some of the best settings to lower within Hitman 3.  

Below, we can see that AMD’s RX 6800 can deliver higher framerates than Nvidia’s RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Ti. However, it is worth noting that we used AMD’s Radeon 20.12.1 driver for the Radeon RX 6800, as AMD’s newer 21.1.1 driver failed to load our test scene on our system. 21.1.1 worked on all of the other Radeon graphics cards that we tested. Radeon Software 21.1.1 promised up to 10% more performance than 20.12.1 in Hitman 3, which means that AMD’s performance could be higher if they address this driver issue.