Hitman 2 Finally Receives DX12 Support, But is it Really Worth it?

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    The latest iteration in the Hitman series i.e Hitman 2 was released last year in November as a DirectX 11 exclusive title. Now, four months later, a new patch (v2.20) adds DirectX12 support.

    Hitman 2 Finally Receives DX12
    Image credits: ign.com

    The March update for the game also brings a new map, Hantu Port, a whole lot of map and stashes fixes, improvements to AI behavior, etc. But still, the main highlight of the update is DX12 compatibility. Although overall, the update is pretty polished, it does introduce two new issues which might be a bit annoying for some:

    • The game can crash when loading Colorado or Sapienza missions with 4K and HDR enabled.
    • The game can crash when using Alt-Tab with HDR enabled.

    HITMAN 2 GPU PEFORMANCE COMPARISON (1080P)

    Hitman 2 Finally Receives DX12
    With DX11 Enabled – Nvidia GTX 1060 vs. AMD RX 580
    Image Credits: pcgamesn.com
    Hitman 2 Finally Receives DX12
    With DX12 Enabled – Nvidia GTX 1060 vs. AMD RX 580
    Image Credits: pcgamesn.com

    With DX11 enabled Nvidia’s GTX 1060 was able to churn out 68 fps on average and 28fps minimum. Enabling DX12 has some pretty significant impact on the fps especially if the system is  Nvidia-powered. And not to mention this impact is mostly negative as the fps takes a hit and drops to 57 fps on average and 27 fps min.

    On the other hand, AMD’s RX 580 was able to hit 70 fps and 26 fps minimum with DX11 enabled. And on enabling DX12 the average fps did drop a bit from 70 fps to 66 fps but the minimum fps saw a considerable jump from just 26 fps to 35 fps.

    Hitman 2 Finally Receives DX12
    FPS Comparison: RTX 2080 vs Radeon RX Vega 64 vs GTX 1080 vs Radeon RX 590
    Image Credits: guru3d.com

    SHOULD YOU ENABLE DX12?

    Well, for the majority of Nvidia users out there, the answer is no. The reason for this is Nvidia’s Pascal architecture has never played along well with DX12. And, this pretty evident when you enable DX12 as both the average and minimum fps take a significant hit for the worse. For Turing however (as well as AMD’s Vega cards), there seems to be a decent performance advantage with the low-level API enabled, so you might consider comparing the two before deciding.

    But for AMD users the story is entirely different as enabling DX12 does reduce the average fps by a tiny bit but the minimum fps is greatly improved, leading to a much smoother overall experience.

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