The new Hitman game will apparently be using DirectX 12- Microsoft’s next generation graphical API is the most efficient and powerful one of its kind on the market, but so far, it has not been used by too many high profile games. IO Interactive’s reboot of the Hitman series should change that.
IO Interactive are hosting panel at GDC titled “Rendering Hitman with DirectX 12,” something that Overclocked3D noticed. This seems to imply that the game was designed for DirectX 12- and indeed, the description for the panel seems to confirm as much, while also mentioning Vulkan.
“This talk will give a brief overview of how the Hitman Renderer works, followed by a deep dive into how we manage everything with DirectX 12, including Pipeline State Objects, Root Signatures, Resources, Command Queues and Multithreading,” the description reads,
“How to write a fast and efficient DirectX 12 / Vulkan engine, and how to use the new HW features to implement new graphics techniques. Learn from real shipping game developers experiences.”
Considering just how powerful DirectX 12 is, and just what the scope of performance benefits from it can be, let’s hope that this is true- I’d like to see a major AAA title that was built with DirectX 12 in mind myself.
Hitman will be launching episodically on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with the first episode due to launch on March 11.