Hitman 3's PC ray tracing upgrade is beautiful - but comes with a big cost

Hitman 3's ray tracing update is out, with the brilliant Io Interactive upgrading its hit title with ray traced reflections and shadows, along with Nvidia DLSS AI upscaling - but alas not AMD's freshly minted FSR 2.0. Intel XeSS support is due further on down the line, but for now, it's all about the RT upgrades, their astonishingly large hit to performance and the extent to which DLSS can mitigate that cost.

Getting right down to it, you are presented with two ray tracing options: ray traced reflections and ray traced shadows from the sun. These are binary selections - on/off - but ray traced reflections actually tie into the standard reflections quality setting, where the low to high settings there control the RT quality. First is the resolution of the reflections: moving from high to medium and then to low gradually reduces the amount of rays shot out used to calculate the reflection. Lower the quality softens them and introduces a touch of instability in motion, although it must be said medium usually looks very similar to high in this regard at native resolution output.

Then there is roughness cut-off - the extent to which RT is calculated according to the roughness of the surface. The rougher a surface, the less impactful an RT reflection will be, so introducing this cut-off is a good way to claw back some performance. The effect is subtle in Hitman 3, but the low setting makes it so that rougher surfaces do not get RT reflections, scaling as you move up to medium and high.

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