Image Quality Modes

Visual Image Quality

Hitman Absolution system requirements will vary greatly depending the graphics settings, but a modest PC will be required to run the game at medium settings or better. Hitman Absolution is built on the new Glacier 2 game engine, and will have variable system requirements. This is the 5th game in the Hitman series, and the first to be built on the new Glacier 2 engine, made by developer IO Interactive. Here are the full Hitman Absolution system requirements for PC gamers:

Hitman Absolution system requirements (minimum)

• CPU: 2.4 GHz dual core Intel or AMD processor
• RAM: 1GB of system memory
• Graphics: DirectX 10 compatible card with 512 MB RAM. Nvidia 8-series or AMD Radeon 3000 series graphics cards.
• Operating system: Windows Vista
• DirectX compatible sound card
• 10 GB of hard drive space

Hitman Absolution system requirements (recommended)

• CPU: 2.6 GHz quad core Intel or AMD processor, Core i5 or Phenom X2
• RAM: 2GB
• Graphics: DirectX 10 compatible card with 1GB of video memory, Nvidia 400-series or AMD 5000-series.
• Operating system: Windows 7
• DirectX compatible sound card
• 10 GB of hard drive space

So on the following two pages I want to show you a couple of in-game screenshots and basically focus on actual in-game quality settings that we use and which  you can change. We always peek as well in-between AMD and NVIDIA's quality differences e.g. in-between AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Honestly, image quality these days for both companies are near equal. You can zoom in and blow up the still screenshots and detect minor differences if you look with a very professional eye as yes -- both companies do optimize games for better performance. We'll leave that as is as there is much more to see quality wise with the in-game modes

Why should you use change or alter internal visual quality modes ? Well for one simple reason, performance .. if you have a lower grade graphics card and would like to plat in Full HD then changes are pretty slim your graphics card would be fast enough. Throttling down towards a lower image quality mode can significantly boost your performance, at the cost of visual quality though. But it creates a good balance in-between what your graphics card can render and what you find acceptable for your average in frames per second.

The game basically has four quality modes: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and ULTRA. Next to that you'll have settings and preferences you can choose from. The game however is quite taxing on the GPU at times game at even medium quality settings. In our chart example below we will use a relatively simple GeForce GTX 660 Ti including a two AA modes and many quality modes to demonstrate that.

First this, for our default test mode will have the high quality settings for textures, shadows and terrain. Pretty much a modern DX10/DX11 class card can run the game at 1920x1080/1200 as you are about to find out as long as you keep it in DX11 HIGH quality mode with 2xMSAA enabled. At that point with a GTX 660 Ti you'd average out at roughly 40 FPS with a minumum of 33 FPS whilst retaining great image quality.

Look what happens with a very generic DX11 class GeForce GTX 660 versus image quality modes versus performance in the chart below:

If you lack performance however triggering down in image quality modes does offer heaps of extra performance, at the cost of quality of course. Truth be told, you shouldn't need to do that but if needed, you could disable FXAA or MSAA all together.

We test with our image quality settings set at 2xMSAA / FXAA enabled with the image quality settings at HIGH.Now overall compared to other game the visual experience is quite nice with this DX11 engine. Hitman Absolution is built on the new Glacier 2 game engine.