Hitman: World Of Assassination Has A Hidden ‘Performance Mode’ On Switch 2

When we reviewed the excellent Hitman: World of Assassination for Switch 2 just a little while back, we came away as impressed as ever with IO Interactive’s incredible world-building and gameplay. However, we were also a little bit disappointed with the game’s performance at launch.

For a title we really love on other platforms, it was unfortunate to have to mark it down to a relatively disappointing 7/10 as a result of some fairly constant choppiness in both docked and handheld modes. And so we are delighted to discover that those boffins over at Digital Foundry (cheers, Eurogamer) seem to have found an unannounced ‘performance mode’ of sorts that we can all benefit from. Hooray for boffins!

According to DF’s Richard Leadbetter, he received an email which notified him that a player had gone into the console system settings to have a muck about due to the fluctuating framerate:

“I went into the system settings and changed the TV output res from 4K to 720p, went back into the game and found it vastly improves performance. The Hawkes Bay Mission ran at… a very solid and stable frame-rate.”

Leadbetter then proceeded to put this to the test, capturing various scenes from the game’s whistle-stop tour of the globe at 4K, 1080p and 720p. Choosing areas that push the GPU and CPU, and give us lots of crowd density, the results, he comments, are very interesting.

In the game’s Whittleton Creek level, as an example, a setting of 4K output manages an average framerate of 46.88fps – which then rises to 59.95fps at 720p. A 62.5% improvement!

At 1080p, things get more interesting still:

“…the game actually seems to be rendering at a slightly higher resolution, with pixel counts suggesting 1152p to 1188p. Meanwhile, with Switch 2 set to 4K, performance drops but pixel counts are still in the same 1152p/1188p window. The performance drop may be down to upscaling to a higher resolution with an approximate cost of around 2.4ms compared to what we assume is the same content without any upscaling.”

Leadbetter continues, unsure whether Hitman is using DLSS to upscale, “as there are rounded edges where we’d expect to see aliasing.” DF has reached out to IO interactive for confirmation.

The team has also checked out the game’s super cool Berlin level, reporting that things jump up by some 61% when knocked down to 720p, whilst 1080p is 9% faster.

Moving on to CPU-intensive crowded areas, and as expected the frame rate jumps aren’t quite so sensational once you factor in a ton of NPCs. However, you are looking at a jump, according to DF, from around 35fps in the Paris fashion show stage, to in and around the 45fps mark, which is still rather tasty.

So, whilst this isn’t an actual performance mode, hence why it hasn’t been mentioned officially by the devs, you can pick up some nice frame boosts if you’re willing to drop your resolution down a little. More interestingly, the disparity in these numbers should, says Leadbetter, enable DF to get a better handle on the computational costs of Nintendo’s DLSS implementation on the new console going forward. Something that’s been a bit of a mystery up until this point!

IO Interactive has also recently announced that it’s working hard on Switch 2 performance issues, so hopefully we won’t have to sacrifice picture clarity for too long.

Have you been playing Hitman: World of Assassination? Tempted to drop the resolution down for some extra frames? Let us know!