The Hitman franchise quickly became a firm favourite among stealth fans due to the tense missions and non-lethal takedowns. Over the years, players have been entertained by Agent 47’s extraordinary escapades. The latest entry in the series adopts the episodic business model which originally made consumers very wary. Thankfully, episode one received widespread critical acclaim which bodes well for the future. Saying that, being an early adopter is risky because it’s unclear what the later episodes will entail. Hitman also incorporates the option to play the game via the DirectX 12 API. This API has the potential to reduce CPU overheads and improve optimization across various hardware configurations. Thankfully, games are starting to use DirectX 12 but it’s a slow process. Unfortunately, the first test subjects like Hitman haven’t gone as planned and suffers from some noticeable technical problems.
According to PC Gamer, the latest Hitman update which grants access to episode 2 has broken the DirectX 12 mode. Annoyingly, when selecting this option the game fails to load across a huge range of graphics card from both AMD and NVIDIA. This begs the question, was the update tested properly? Hopefully, a patch will be released as a matter of urgency to fix this problem. I was intending to do a DirectX 12 performance article but that will now have to wait until this ridiculous bug is addressed.
