The development studio IO Interactive is cooperating with Intel in the optimization of “Hitman 3”. The chip manufacturer’s software developers should help ensure that the game directly supports Intel’s upcoming graphics chips. Intel has entered into such partnerships earlier, for example for its own processor optimizations or smooth frame rates with the integrated GPUs.

Intel goes for the action game “Hitman 3” Apparently a step further: As IO Interactive explains, there will be a patch after the release that integrates ray tracing graphics effects into the game. Intel will support the calculation of virtual rays in hardware with the gaming GPU Xe HPG. The developers also built in Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which combines several pixels into blocks in order to reduce the amount of shading required for the color gradations and thus increase the frame rate.

Ray tracing optimizations common Intel’s Xe-HPG-GPU, which is manufactured at TSMC in 7-nanometer technology, should 2021 appear. Cooperation with developer studios should ensure that showcase projects for your own hardware can be played at the start. AMD (“Godfall” with Radeon ray tracing) and Nvidia (including “Cyberpunk 2077” with GeForce ray tracing) proceed in a similar way. Ultimately, however, the graphics cards of all three manufacturers should be able to display the ray tracing graphics effects thanks to standardized APIs – possibly just less well optimized for one architecture.

Further optimizations concern processors: IO Interactive wants to utilize eight computing cores and more, for example for more complex destruction physics in cities or larger NPC collections. The first “Hitman” part of 2016 was one of the first titles with DirectX – 12 -Support including multi-core utilization. (mma)