Hitman Absolution PC Review

Minimum requirements:

• Windows Vista
• 2GHz Dual Core Intel or AMD Athlon X2
• GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB or AMD HD2600 XT 512MB
• 2GB RAM
• 24GB HDD Space

Recommended requirements:

• Windows 7
• Intel Core i5 (1st gen) or AMD Athlon II X4
• GTX 260 896MB or HD 5770 1GB
• 4GB RAM
• 24GB HDD Space

Test System:

• Windows 7
• Intel Core i5 (Ivy Bridge) 3750K (stock speeds)
• 2 x Nvidia GTX 660 Ti 2GB (SLI)
• 8GB RAM

I was expecting Hitman to look good, what I wasn’t expecting was for it to look anywhere near as good as it does. The developers have done a stunning job bringing this title to life on PC and the game engine really gave my system a run for its money.

Sure you can run this game on an GTX 260 at a good level of detail, most likely on par with the console editions, yet the PC can always go one further. By the time you throw in high levels of tessellation, AA, AF and especially Global Illumination, you’re going to need some serious GPU horse power.

Fortunately the game comes with a built in benchmark tool, but I feel there is still plenty of room for improvement in terms of the games performance via future driver updates and a better SLI profile. I surely hope so at least given how far above the recommended specifications our test system is, which still only gave us 55FPS in the benchmark. We did however get around 80FPS average in gameplay.

Hitman Absolution is a real treat on the eyes though, textures look rich, colorful and well detailed. The characters are well modeled and animated, so too are the guns and environment details.

The real winner here though is lighting, this is one of the best lit games I have seen and its use of cinematic filters, subtle reflections and accurate shadows really helps to bring the game world to life. The only (comical) side effect of this seems that Agent 47’s head lights up like a nuclear explosion when a sun beam catches it, a side effect of the stunning lighting engine and a polished head it seems.