Hitman’s ray tracing 3 update is over, with Io Interactive’s cool upgrade taking its title through ray tracing reflections and shadows, along with an upgrade from Nvidia’s DLSS AI — but unfortunately not AMD’s new FSR 2.0. Intel XeSS is set to get more support, but for now, it’s all about RT upgrades, their amazingly large impact on performance and how much DLSS can mitigate that cost.
When accessed, you are presented with two ray tracing options: ray tracing reflections and ray tracing shadows from the sun. These are dual selections – on/off – but ray tracing reflections actually link to the standard reflections quality setting, where the low to high settings control the RT quality. The first is the accuracy of the reflections: going from high to medium and then to low gradually reduces the amount of rays that are released to calculate the reflection. Low quality softens it and adds to the instability of the movement, although it must be said that the medium is usually very similar to the high in this respect when outputting the original resolution.
Then there is the roughness cutoff – how far RT is calculated according to the surface roughness. The rougher the surface, the less impact the RT reflection has, so introducing this class is a good way to get some performance back. The effect is subtle in Hitman 3, but the low setting makes it so that rough surfaces don’t get RT reflections, and it expands as you go into the mid and highs.
However, the biggest difference between the settings is in the amount of objects that are tracked versus and the complexity of those objects. At a high level, every person and object in the scene is in RT reflections, while the medium makes smart choices in reducing the number and density of objects, resulting in a very similar effect overall. Meanwhile, as expected, lower settings see many objects removed from reflections, while reflected characters have lower resolution.
For RT shades, the effect is more limited and is really a straightforward binary on/off option. Toggling the effect changes the player’s closest sun shade to upgraded and ray-tracing rewards. However, not every light source receives RT shadows – in fact, all artificial light shades are achieved via standard shadow maps, just like a regular game.
What this all means is that the screen space reflections and background cube maps used in the vanilla game have been upgraded with more realistic alternatives to ray tracing – though the game’s actual mirrors are still rendered by rendering on flat surfaces, effectively twice the scene processing – which is The effect is likely to be more expensive than RT. The reason for doing this is to maintain an established art style and because these planar reflections can actually be of a higher quality in some respects.
Overall, I would say the RT reflections help greatly with the presentation in Hitman 3, adding a lot to the many views in the game, especially indoors where they are mostly visible. Although it’s not perfect: it has its own drawbacks in terms of stability and reflections RT itself uses screen space information aggressively when it can, which usually works very well, but can sometimes lead to interruptions. Despite smaller problems like this, RT reflections are almost always an upgrade of previous reflection systems in those regions where they replace them.
However, RT shades have less impact on the game’s visuals. It helps with the quality of sun shades in the usual way you’d expect it to, and it adds in the shades until you get a nice softening, so you can even apply it to vegetation which isn’t necessarily a given because that’s expensive and complicated in itself. They also offer a narrow-shaven contact shade to emphasize the details, which is nice though. However, RT shadows are also of limited range: after a certain distance, the RT shadows blend and instead see shadow maps in place Unfortunately, these shadow maps are completely unfiltered and look rather harsh by comparison.
This is a confusing decision as normal shadow maps are filtered at a distance without RT – so there is a strange scenario where these shadows actually look better with RT turned off. At least the cost of using RT’s shadows is somewhat limited compared to mirroring – in the RTX 3080 at 1440p, the game benchmark reports a performance in the region of 34 percent, rising to 41 percent on an AMD RX 6800 XT equivalent. However, there is also a 30 percent impact on CPU performance as well, and as you will discover, RT in general has a huge impact on frame rate even on the most powerful set.
RT’s reflections are relatively heavy on the GPU, so much so that the RTX 3090 running the low setting at 4K sees 60 percent less performance on the low setting, and 67 percent worse on the medium with 72 percent hitting the top. Going from 4K at 120fps to 60fps all the time is tough, and as you’ll see in the video on this page, less capable cards at lower resolutions still have a mountain to climb in terms of getting decent performance, while the gap between hardware devices varies. AMD and Nvidia according to RT load.
Ultimately for AMD RDNA 2 GPUs, I really only recommend the low-reflective setting for GPUs from the RX 6800 XT and above…but until then, this decision is questionable because performance is still severe, while FSR 1.0 does not do a good job Enough in the upgrade to compensate and there is no FSR 2.0 option, for now at least. Really, I imagine most Radeon users will only choose the shades of RT that are more cost effective over these GPUs. For Nvidia users, I’d only recommend looking at RTX 3080-tier GPUs with RT reflectances set to Medium, while lower-tier RTX 3070 GPUs choosing low reflections. Anything less than this class of performance isn’t really racing, and I’d suggest using only the RT shades option. Oh, and by the way, according to the recommendations of the Io Interactive specification, I only suggest reflections used in coordination with DLSS – yes, the result was really high.
Even taking into account those factual recommendations, what should be emphasized is that RT in Hitman 3 is not only GPU heavy, but extraordinarily impactful on CPU performance as well, varying on a scene-by-scene basis. Effectively, the more complex the scene, the higher the CPU hit rate. If there are a lot of NPCs or objects on the screen, the CPU cost goes up. In a scene full of objects and characters, many CPUs won’t be able to handle the required processing without dropping frames even if a GPU with for example DLSS has enough power to do graphics calculations. Again, I’ve found that AMD GPU users did worse here, with higher CPU usage, which seems odd. Due to generally very high CPU requirements, it’s hard to say how many people would realistically want to run RT reflections even if your GPU has power, you probably don’t have your own.
Another issue is that implementing DLSS in Hitman 3 can be quite problematic. The static display starts to show off over time – something I’ve seen in Dying Light 2’s pre-release code (fixed by launch) and in Deathloop. Furthermore, many characters from mid to far seem to cause smearing issues: almost as if characters stop generating motion vectors at some point. In my opinion, this is generally detrimental to DLSS image quality even if other aspects of DLSS image quality are good.
DLSS Performance mode also has some serious issues with noise in ray tracing reflections — on top of other stability issues I’ve never seen in other DLSS implementations. Balanced modes and quality are good, but there are definitely issues with Performance mode. Finally, these issues limit the effectiveness of DLSS – and I hope to see all of this comprehensively addressed.
In short, I have mixed reactions to Hitman’s upgrade of ray tracing. I think the reflections in general are of really high quality and I think it’s commendable that Io has added in different quality levels to mitigate at least some of the maximum performance cost. However, even with these quality levels, it remains expensive, posing profound challenges to even the most powerful CPUs and GPUs. Shades of RT is less impressive and not transformative, but at least it has reasonable CPU and GPU performance costs. I imagine most people would choose to use these instead and see the mirroring option as something best left to future PCs.