Hitman: Absolution

Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix as the fifth entry in the Hitman series. Hitman: Absolution runs on IO Interactive’s own custom DX11 Glacier 2 game engine which was specifically built for it with an emphasis on rendering very dense crowds of up to 1200 individuals. It was released November, 2012 (week 47) and it is ABT’s latest DX11 benchmark.

Here are the settings we chose.

Here is the benchmark run with DOF.

Here it is with DOF disabled.  You gain about 2fps by disabling it either on a GTX 680 or a HD 7970 at 1920×1080.

Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the GTX 680.  It has a relatively smooth delivery of frames as confirmed by the chart below:

The next chart really does convey the jitter experienced when playing Hitman: Absolution or running the benchmark even though the HD 7970 is faster than the GTX 680.  Now the frame time chart for the HD 7970 at GHz edition speeds:

Here is the GTX 680 ranking:

Finally the HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds ranking.

As evidenced by the frame times charts, there is a lot of difference in smoothness experienced by the gamer between playing Hitman: Absolution on a GTX 680 versus playing it on a HD 7970.  The benchmark may be more demanding than the game, but the jitter is still evident on the Radeon.   Even though the HD 7970 is faster in raw framerates, the frame delivery is uneven and it detracts from gameplay.   We will continue to monitor AMD’s drivers in this particular case.