HITMAN 3 released a few days ago to critical acclaim (including our own). Those of you who’d like to see it supporting ray tracing might do well to wait, though, as IO Interactive revealed a while ago this will happen with a post-launch update thanks to a partnership with Intel.
Now, speaking to Xbox Wire, IO Interactive’s Chief Technical Officer Maurizio de Pascale confirmed that ray tracing will hit HITMAN 3 on Xbox Series S and X, too.
We see Hitman as a ‘live game’ and our launch date on January 20 is just the beginning of a journey, in which we’re going to keep working on the game and adding new features. It’s great that the GPU in the Series X|S has hardware support for Ray-Tracing. We’ve already started working on RT technology for the renderer in our Glacier engine, and once that’s deemed ready for prime time, we’ll definitely bring it to the Series X|S hardware.
Later in the interview with Xbox Wire, de Pascale also discussed the enhancements made to HITMAN 3 thanks to the next-generation hardware available with the new Xbox consoles.
The power of the new Xbox makes it possible to bring our games to life (on screen) exactly as the development team originally intended, without the compromises and constraints from lack of CPU cycles or IO bandwidth of lesser hardware.
The enhancements we’ve added for the new consoles allowed us to increase the fidelity of our simulation, beyond what players have seen when playing Hitman 2 on the previous generation.
For instance, the NPCs in each location are updated at a higher frequency and in larger numbers, our cloth runs more iterations, destruction uses more shards and particles, and so on.
It made a lot of sense for us to focus on improving resolution and frame rates because a lot of our source assets were already created as 4K-ready, but for obvious reasons had to be scaled down on the previous generation hardware.
On the Series X|S hardware, we can finally take advantage of those extra details in the source textures.
