Hitman World of Assassination on Nintendo Switch 2 May Have Revealed Performance Cost of NVIDIA DLSS, Hidden System Feature
The Nintendo Switch 2 port of Hitman World of Assassination may have revealed some new details on the system, including a possible hidden system feature.
On the latest episode of their weekly podcast, the tech experts at Digital Foundry took a good look at the port of the latest entry in the series developed by IO Interactive after having been informed that the game seemingly runs better when lowering the system’s resolution. After conducting some tests, the tech experts confirmed that Hitman World of Assassination indeed changes resolution when the system resolution is changed via the system menu, allowing users to enable some sort of Performance Mode by lowering the resolution to 720p. In the GPU-limited Whittleton Creek area, the game is 62.5% faster at 720p, 9.7% faster at 1080p resolution than in 4K resolution, and in the Berlin area, which is similarly GPU-bound, the performance differentials are very similar – 61% faster at 720p, 7% faster at 1080p.
While the discovery of this hidden Performance Mode is quite interesting by itself, there are a few other things that make this unique Hitman World of Assassination feature notable. For starters, the performance difference between 1080p and 4K resolution can only be explained if 4K resolution uses NVIDIA DLSS to upscale the image from a lower resolution, and the around 10% performance difference discovered during testing could very well be the performance cost of upscaling with DLSS from 1080p to 4K resolution. Even more interesting is the fact that the game instantly changes the resolution when the system resolution is changed, which could be a hidden Nintendo Switch 2 system feature, as the tech experts noted how IO Interactive could have made these display modes options available via an in-game menu if they wished to have them in the game.
Being the first handheld device that uses NVIDIA DLSS, the Nintendo Switch 2 is a very interesting system from a technical standpoint, but each new discovery is making it even more interesting as users delve deeper into what it offers. You can learn more about the new Nintendo console by checking out Chris’s review.
