The new PC patch for Hitman, released the other day, introduced a lot of welcome things (weapon holstering, UI toggles) and one not so welcome thing. Part of the update was a new “recommended” graphics settings button that you can press on the launcher; but it’s rather aggressive and applies them whether you want it to or not.
That’s the theory put forward on the Hitman subreddit, and after doing a bit of testing for myself it seems pretty likely this is what’s going on. No matter whether I tell the game to apply vsync or not, it defaults to not doing so (as suggested by the “recommended” button). Shadows also appear to be rendering in higher quality than I’d actually selected too (again, in line with the internal recommendations).
The upshot of this is that Hitman players on PC will currently be getting unexpected performance results. It’ll either be a boost or a drop, depending whether the recommended settings are being overly-ambitious or under-selling your system. That’s unlikely to change until some kind of fix is released.
