PC graphics settings

[Grief Reaper]

Can any of the dev's or PC enthusiasts clue me up on what aspects of the Glacier 2 Engine can be manually changed, ie: Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic filtering, Transparency supersampling... so on.

Using a program like Nvidia Inspector I can for most games change properties to my liking. Upon trying to do this with the Hitman: Sniper Challenge not much worked barring setting the frame rate to 58fps to reduce input lag. I would really like to use 8x Anti-aliasing!!!

So my question is will there be any compatibility for Anti-aliasing or other settings?

[Grief Reaper]

No response yet from any of the dev's in regard to Anti-aliasing featured in Hitman: Absolution.


So I took it upon myself to find a way to get AA to work for Hitman: Sniper Challenge, the closest match to how the final game engine will render. So onto what I have found out.

Any form of external/driver AA is not compatible, that includes fxaa and smaa injectors. Driver based AA does not have a compatibility flag.

The only way that any AA could be achieved is via downsampling. Shown below is the outcome of using downsampling before and after.

Before: (Native display resolution - 1360x768)


After: (Downsampled display resolution - 3200x1800)


As you can see above their are far less jagged edges on objects and texture quality is dramatically improved.

My specs:

Core i5 3570k @4.0 GHz
Gigabyte Z77X-D3H
4Gb DDR3 ram @1600MHz
Evga GTX 670 2Gb

Fps at this high of a resolution is surprisingly playable:

1360x768 - Average fps=60
2560x1600 - Average fps=60!!!
3200x1800 - Average fps=47

If you want to try this out then add a custom resolution in the Nvidia control panel, test to see if it works, I recommend 2560x1600. Then start the game and select the new resolution.

[Nixxes]

It is great to see you are getting such good results when forcing supersampling!

We are not explicitly trying to support any external tweaking programs like Nvidia inspector. However, in Hitman Absolution we will be offering quite some settings in the game, including support for multiple levels of FXAA and MSAA, control over the level of anisotropic filtering, resolutions of shadow maps, LOD settings, and various optional features on top of that.

[Platinumoxicity]

I have never used antialiasing or supersampling. All it does is make thin lines consistent. For example, phone wires hanging in the air look shredded into a dozen pieces because the areas of the geometry that fall between rendered pixels are not rendered at all. On supersampled resolution those parts are rendered, but they fade slightly because they are between pixels, therefore it looks smoother and more consistent.

The thing is, that I have never been bothered by that. And more often than not, for some reason MSAA creates more inconsistency, because it doesn't work on transparent alpha channel textures. For example in STALKER which is full of trees and bushes that use transparent textures, MSAA makes the game look worse, because only half of what you see has smooth edges. When everything you see has jagged edges it looks much better.

But with supersampling I'm sure that it's physically impossible for that kind of glitch to happen, because it just samples down a larger resolution.