AMD has announced that it and IO Interactive have collaborated to make sure that Hitman takes full advantage of DirectX 12, with AMD’s cards optimized to take advantage of its features.
According to a press release issued by AMD, ”Hitman will leverage unique DX12 hardware found in only AMD Radeon GPUs—called asynchronous compute engines—to handle heavier workloads and better image quality without compromising performance.” Asynchronous compute tech can’t be used with DirectX 11.
What does AMD’s Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE) do? Well, according to the company, GCN-based GPUs can be used to leverage DX12’s new Asynchronous Shaders feature to improve performance by up to 46%. This is done by handing out several tasks simultaneously to the compute units inside a GPU. Each ACE is capable of handling eight queues and every GCN-based GPU has a minimum of two ACEs.
Hitman’s Steam page has also revealed the system requirements for the upcoming game, as well:
Minimum:
- OS: OS 64-bit Windows 7
- Processor: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon HD 7870
- DirectX: Version 11
Recommended:
- OS: OS 64-bit Windows 7 / 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1) or Windows 10
- Processor: Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3.4 GHz / AMD CPU AMD FX-8350 4 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770 / AMD GPU Radeon R9 290
- DirectX: Version 11
The first two chapters of Hitman will be released on March 11th, 2016 - the first part of the game’s episodic release over the course of 2016.