When Hitman 2 originally came out, we were really disappointed by its PC version. Contrary to the first Hitman game, Hitman 2 had very limited graphics settings, did not support DX12 and lacked a benchmark tool. Thankfully, and since then, IO Interactive has been constantly improving it, and released yesterday a patch that added support for DirectX 12. As such, we’ve decided to benchmark DX12 and see whether the game runs better with it.
For this benchmark test between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, we used our Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 16GB of DDR3 RAM at 2133Mhz, NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce 419.35 driver.
Hitman 2 features two benchmark levels and by simply looking at the minimum and average results, someone would falsely think that DX12 isn’t doing anything particularly impressive in this title. With DirectX 11, the Miami benchmark ran with a minimum of 28fps and an average of 73fps and the Mumbai benchmark ran with a minimum of 38fps and an average of 73fps. With DirectX 12, the Miami benchmark ran with a minimum of 44fps and an average of 76fps and the Mumbai benchmark ran with a minimum of 48fps and an average of 77fps.
However, by comparing specific scenes we actually see a significant performance increase when using DX12. As showcased below, in most CPU/RAM-limited scenes we are looking at a 15-23fps performance boost. This is a significant performance increase at it will allow players to enjoy the game without any major framerate drops below 60fps on older hardware.
So yeah, Hitman 2 is another PC game that performs better with DX12 than with DX11. After all, the same thing happened with the first Hitman game so we are not really surprised by this performance difference. Still, we do have to note that we’ve experienced some crashes and some additional stutters with DX12 so it seems that IO Interactive needs to further optimize its code in order to address these minor issues.
Below you can find our comparison screenshots between DX11 (left) and DX12 (right).
What’s also interesting here is that owners of newer CPUs, like the Intel i7 8700K, will also experience significantly better performance with DX12. Reddit’s member ‘jeesusperkele‘ has shared some comparison in which an NVIDIA GeForce GTX1080Ti so from 30-40fps performance gains in DirectX 12.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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