GeForce GTX 980 2 and 3-way SLI review - DX11: Hitman Absolution

DX11: Hitman Absolution 

Agent 47 is back and is enrolled in a bloody mess. IO promises the game will be more accessible to new players but retain the hardcore mechanics that have made Hitman one of the top stealth first person shooters for PC. Plot details include series protagonist Agent 47 assassinating his former International Contract Agency handler, Diana Burnwood, early in the game. One of the main antagonists is Blake Dexter, a new character to the series. The character is voiced by Keith Carradine. In this article we are going to look at DirectX 11 class graphics performance.

So obviously the dark blue entries are single card performance and in light blue the 2-way SLI performance is shown, the lightest blue is the 3-way config. All cards run the same frequency, actually this is managed by the Nvidia driver these days with an active SLI limiter.

• DirectX 11
• High Quality settings
• 2x MSAA
• 16x AF
• Internal benchmark

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 Glacier 2 game engine. Up-to 2560x1440 we have CPU limitation, after which the SLI combo gladly shows it's rendering strength. Massive 2-way SLI scaling here, 3-way however not so much.

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. Hitman Absolution is harsh with High image quality settings and 2x MSAA enabled. Look at that, so yeah ... Hitman clearly reaches a CPU bottleneck at roughly 100 FPS.