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DF: Hitman 3 PC Ray Tracing Upgrade: Looks Good - But A Big Hit To Performance

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?



Hitman 3 has finally received a ray tracing upgrade for PC, adding RT reflections, shadows and Nvidia DLSS. The results can be beautiful, but the hit to performance - even with DLSS active - is extraordinary. Alex Battaglia has the full report.


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In summary, I have mixed reactions to Hitman's ray tracing upgrade. I think the reflections are generally of a really high quality and I think it is commendable that Io has added in various quality tiers to at least mitigate some of the extreme performance cost. However, even with those quality tiers they remain expensive, posing profound challenges for even the most powerful CPUs and GPUs. RT shadows are less impressive and not so transformative, but at least they have more reasonable CPU and GPU performance costs. I imagine most people will opt to use these instead and see the reflection option as something best left for future PC hardware.
 
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Kuranghi

Member
Wide 47 Walking:




Looks wonderful from intro I saw, bit too much of a perf hit for it to be used realistically though, imagine having to play at 1440p on a 3080 but for THIRTY, not even 60 fps. I only glanced at it and wasn't sure if that was with DLSS off, I assume off, lol if not. Just put DLSS on and it'll be better than native 4K anyway :messenger_smirking: or something.

Heres the real reason I'm here though:

*comment about the gamma being fucked and ultimate disappointment in H3, still haven't played it despite 1000+ hours in H1 & H2*
 
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winjer

Gold Member
I tried it on my PC, but performance was so bad, it's pointless to use.
RT shadows is almost identical to normal shadows, unless you are comparing images side by side, with 300% zoom. This dropped my performance from 110 fps to 80 fps.
RT reflections does make a greater difference in visual, but it's dependent on scene. This dropped my performance to 30-40 fps.
Considering how bad the game runs with RT on, it is not a useful feature.
 

Cryio

Member
A few years in, we thought developers got a better hang of optimizing for RT and performance got manageable even at 1440p without DLSS/FSR for some games.

Hell, there are devs doing 1080p30/1080p60 and 4K30 with RT on consoles.

Then comes a new round of games (Dying Light 2, Hitman 3), where the RT hit is so profound, it's clear we're several GPU generations away (I'd say, at least 3?) until RT gameplay is viable for the majority of games, on a range of GPUs, at more than just 1080p or below 1080p.
 
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Killer8

Member
Probably the first game i've seen that looks worse with ray-tracing. The claim is that the reflections look more realistic because of the way they interact with the materials, which may be true, but I think the crystal clear reflections from the old SSR implementation looked stylistically better. You lose a lot of the sheen from the Dubai level. There is also a murkiness/blobbiness to the RT reflections, even on the highest setting, which seems to afflict many games that use it (GT7 and RE: Village spring to mind). The RT shadows sometimes look better up close, like the shadows cast from trees in the Miami level, but the jagged RT shadows which you see in the distance are far more noticeable than the benefits.
 
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Kuranghi

Member
The animations take me out of the experience no matter how good the visuals are.

Its unfortunately the price you pay for it being so freeform, they need to walk to their specific marks for the scripted events to work properly and having a nice blend for every possible direction they could approach from is a bit of a tall order. It will be nice if they can upgrade the animation blending of the engine for the 007 game though. Although possibly thats a completely different genre/scope of game and will be more linear anyway.
 

Xyphie

Member
It's should be seen as perfectly fine to ship a game with graphic settings which existing hardware really can't handle. In fact we should encourage such "future proofing" as much as possible.
 
Challenge accepted, haven't revisited this since the release. I was waiting for the roguelike mode, still looks far away though
 

yamaci17

Member
With this performance, a good 30fps cap is a must (with proper framepacing like steam deck has).
its actually possible get mostly 60 fps at native 1080p with RT Reflections Low on a 3060ti (or 1440p DLSS quality) Would probably hit a native 1440p-60 FPS on the 3080 with RT low settings (4K DLSS perf or quality)

https://imgsli.com/MTA5NjAz/0/1

https://imgsli.com/MTA5NjAx/3/0
https://imgsli.com/MTA5NjAx/3/1 (high RT here drops frames to 30)

https://imgsli.com/MTA5NTg3/2/1 (high RT here drops frames to 46)


https://imgsli.com/MTA5NDUx/3/0
https://imgsli.com/MTA5NDUx/3/2 (you can see that RT reflections here are blocky even with high setting. pre-baked reflections are simply better in such cases)

Here is the problem: RT Med and RT High reflections are reserved for future hardware. RT Low Reflections of Hitman 3 performs similar to other AAA games that introduced RT reflections. Most other games default to such a sane setting and do not let user to go higher, because then we have meltdown like these in forums and reviews. Because most "PC folk" shudder at the thought of anything labeled "low".

RT med/high uses an insame amount of BHV calculations which makes all CPUs and GPUs crumble. Yes, reflection resolution takes a hit with the coveted Low setting and some objects are not reflected at all but that's the case with other RT games. Far Cry 6 for example uses a very low reflection render resolution for its RT reflections and there's no knob to set it higher. Therefore, everyone praises that game as to how good of a ray tracing performance it has. Same goes for Doom Eternal. Actually, that game has some headroom for higher end GPUs to render higher resolution reflections but the option is simply not there (outside of config files)

RT Low will still provide the benefits of Ray traced reflections %90 of the time over the usual SSR. But since the game has beautiful prebaked reflections in some maps, you may as well ignore it. But it does not, still, change the fact that most other RT reflections games have comparable reflections to the Hitman 3's low RT reflections and med and higher setting are just there to push the ceiling.

I think IOI should immediately dispatch a patch and make it so that RT reflections use RT low as a baseline (call it RT Reflections medium and call the the current RT medium setting RT High)
 
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Buggy Loop

Member
Can enemies see your reflection to know you’re about to fuck them up?

Would be honestly sad if not

I don’t understand how only reflections and shadows, without RTGI, has these costs in performances.
 

Kuranghi

Member
Can enemies see your reflection to know you’re about to fuck them up?

Would be honestly sad if not

I don’t understand how only reflections and shadows, without RTGI, has these costs in performances.

They can with actual mirrors (Like a full wall mirror in the bathrooms) in the non-RT graphics, but I think if they turned on that switch for all the new RT reflective surfaces in the game it might be kind of annoying in terms of removing fun ways to do things. Not so much for you pointing a gun at the back of someones head, I think it would be fine for NPCs to see that in all the new reflections, but something like just running behind them with an illegal item thats not a gun would be annoying because its not like these reflections are/would be perfect mirrors so it would be less fun as a game for them to perceive that imo.

I don't think they could program it to be selective, its either a mirror or its not as far as the code is concerned. So I say keep it off for most things except near perfect mirrored surfaces.
 

sachos

Member
Can't wait to go back to these games and play them in 240fps with my brand new RTX 9080. Jokes aside, RT is amazing, i particualrly dont care if we cant fully enjoy it with the hardware today, i see it as the Crysis like software of our time, something you will keep using as a benchmark as you keep upgrading your PC over the years.
 
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YCoCg

Member
This video does a much better job of just showing a more variety of areas as a Before/After comparison, also why reflections are power hungry, even decoration baubles and the like get them!

 

ClosBSAS

Member
Lol what a waste....no game has surpassed cyberpunk 2077, control or metro Exodus in their implementation of rtx. Cyberpunk topping off the podium. That shit looks amazing with rtx.
 

T-Cake

Member
Can't wait to go back to these games and play them in 240fps with my brand new RTX 9080. Jokes aside, RT is amazing, i particualrly dont care if we cant fully enjoy it with the hardware today, i see it as the Crysis like software of our time, something you will keep using as a benchmark as you keep upgrading your PC over the years.

Listen to this man! Has everyone either forgotten or not been born yet when PC games were future proofed and couldn't max GPUs of the times? Bring those days back! Let's have games that are ready for future iterations of GPUs. I'm actually shocked that ABattaglia is moaning about it!
 
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Shmunter

Member
What’s wrong with planar reflection? Fake but accurate, less performance hit than rt.

Just keep doing that till it’s feasible to not.
 

yamaci17

Member
If they tried to release this mess on consoles, you'd get a nice slideshow.
nope, rt low reflections + rt shadows + high lod (not ultra) can easily hit 1440p 30 fps on 6600xt/6700xt (in the video, 6800xt is able to get 40-90 frames depending on the scene with RT low preset reflections)

no need for slideshow, just set the RT to low. enjoy the RT on both midrange PCs and consoles. simple as that. RT med and RT high is suited for future GPUs

i'd really like someone to do RT low benchmarks on a 6600xt @1440p with high LODs and optimized settings. it would most likely hit upwards of 30 frames all the time

https://imgsli.com/MTA5NTg3/1/0

https://imgsli.com/MTA5NjAx/0/1

now imagine all those 3080/3090 benchmarks with RT low setting. they'd get great framerates, just like they do in other RT titles.

once again, RT low in this game matches other games that only have "rt reflection" toggle. med and high is just there to push the ceiling. it is for future GPUs. if those games had higher RT settings, those games would also crumble all RT capable hardware. It is simple as that.
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
interesting to note that in some cases the planar reflections give a better result than RT reflections
That's only because they can render the entire object and project it onto the 2D plane. Of course the object itself is going to have better samples than casting rays to approximate an object's color. It won't work in general use cases though.
 
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MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
Won't matter. 4x000 series is still not going to be powerful enough. We are several generations from seeing really good approximations using RT for all aspects of the rendering pipeline. It's just way too expensive right now.

Will matter. Every little helps. :messenger_heart:
 

intbal

Member
Hangar 13 had the right idea with their ray traced cube maps. Very little performance hit. High quality reflections where you need them. Fast reflections where you don't.
Even the base Xbox One can do it.
It's a tragedy that they're abandoning their own tech to switch to UE5.
 

Crayon

Member
Rt is such a tease. For the last 20 years I had always assumed the jump from raster to raytracing would be a all or nothing. I thought we'd jump to full raytracing and hasn't considered that we'd have these baby steps. Sprinkling it of here and there and bringing top tier hardware to it's knees.

Like it's a bummer that and rt performance is bad (especially for consoles because we are stuck with that) but in the big picture, truly worthile rt is not that close.

Like I'm playing cyberpunk on a ps5 right now and the rt shadows are really nice. Subtle, but I appreciate the effect. What's not subtle is slashing the fps in half.

I'm hoping that it'll be a little more usable when ES6 comes out. That's when I'm buying my next gpu.
 
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