Oh Agent 47, how could you wrong me so? Forget all those fibre wire chokings and random acts of slaphead slaughter in this weekend’s Hitman PC beta. What really hurts are reports of the assassin’s seemingly shoddy optimisation work or lack thereof.
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The dudes and dudettes over at Gaming Bolt have been putting the beta – available to those who’ve pre-ordered the game until tomorrow evening – through its paces, and the results are troubling.
Running the game on a Radeon R9290 4GB GPU along with an AMD FX 8350, the site claims they’re struggling to maintain a steady 30fps during the opening training mission.
After spending an hour or so roaming around this tutorial level, which is set on a swanky ship, I can confirm the beta suffers from some crippling performance issues. Even with two 980 TIs, I can’t get the chrome dome killer’s antics to run at a locked 60fps at 1080p.
Now admittedly the beta doesn’t seem to support SLI/Crossfire setups – prepare for serious micro-stutter if you intend to run the game with dual GPUs – but the frame-rate issues with a single 980 TI are rife, too. I’ve run the opening level at both 1440p and 2160p, and have hit lows of 39fps on the former and 22fps on the latter resolution. I can only imagine what the frame-rate is like on more affordable (read: sane) hardware.
Turns out those massive crowds of NPCs absolutely slay performance. In quieter scenes with less characters on screen, the action generally holds close to 60fps at 1080p/1440p, but considering this is a game built around murdering folk while shimmying through huge groups of onlookers, that’s not much consolation.
Even Nvidia’s latest Game Ready 361.91 driver, which is supposed to be optimised for the Hitman beta, fails to improve matters for me. Here’s hoping IO Interactive can get these performance/optimisation issues ironed out when the first full episode releases on March 11th -remember, 47 has gone episodic. Seeing as Hitman: Absolution was treated to an absolutely stonking PC port, I’m willing to give IO some benefit of the doubt.