Hitman finally gave a reboot to the stealthy assassin franchise back in 2016. With the title proving to be good enough success for IO Interactive, it seems like the title is about to get some enhancements for Xbox One X users.
Talking IO Interactive’s Jonas Meyer, Xbox confirmed how Hitman would scale on the Xbox One X. Mr Jonas says that not only would Hitman run at 4K/30FPS on the Xbox One X with the High-Quality preset, but it would also give users the options to run the game at 60FPS. What’s interesting here is that the high-performance preset still provides some excellent eye-candy for gamers by running the game with an internal resolution that could ramp upto 4K under certain circumstances.
With High Quality, you get True Native 4K rendering, targeted at 30fps and we’re using the additional GPU power to render Higher Quality shadows. “High Framerate” targets 60fps, at a slightly lower internal resolution – but still renders a 4k image. Both modes use the extra memory of the console to store more high-resolution textures in memory, and has increased texture filtering quality. – Jonas Meyer, IO Interactive
What’s remarkable is that not only do both consoles get some worthy bumps in quality and framerate, but they would also pack better textures thanks to the Xbox One X’s beastly internals.
Taking advantage of IO Interactive’s PC launch of the title, the studio decided to use the assets used for PC gamers on the Xbox One X. Here IO Interactive’s Jonas Meyer explains have they managed to easily push their game to the Xbox One X without as much effort as other console exclusives. When asked about how easy was it to get Hitman running on the Xbox One X, he replied with:
Getting everything up and running on Xbox One X was very easy. Increasing our render quality for the High Quality version was also easy, as we have assets from PC we can leverage. Hitting 60fps in High Framerate was quite challenging, but we managed to find a way to hit that 60 fps. Here’s how we did it: As the Hitman world simulation is very complicated, we were not able to optimize the simulation itself to run at 60fps, so instead we opted to double the number of rendered frames, and optimize the rendering instead. This means for every simulation tick, we render two frames, giving that smooth 60fps experience.
Not only did they use some trickery to get the game to run at 60FPS without breaking the title, but the enhancements all together should be able to re-introduce a new Hitman title to Xbox One X owners who already own a copy of the title. Not only have they improved the textures and resolution, but they have also worked on improving the lighting from the game thanks the whole push into HDR.
Not only does Hitman join Microsoft’s list of enhanced Xbox One X titles, but would also show off what the assassin is capable of in a well-enhanced environments. The are some excellent enhancements from the developers over at IO Interactive for sure.
Source: Xbox
