The Nintendo Switch 2 port of Hitman World of Assassination has potentially uncovered new insights into the system’s performance, including a possible hidden feature.
During the latest episode of their weekly podcast, Digital Foundry’s tech experts examined the port of the popular title developed by IO Interactive after receiving reports that the game runs better when the system resolution is lowered.
Upon further testing, they confirmed that Hitman World of Assassination indeed adjusts its resolution based on changes to the system’s resolution settings. This allows users to activate a sort of ‘Performance Mode’ by lowering the resolution to 720p. In GPU-heavy areas, such as Whittleton Creek, the game runs 62.5% faster at 720p, 9.7% faster at 1080p, compared to 4K resolution. The Berlin area, similarly GPU-limited, shows comparable performance improvements-61% faster at 720p and 7% faster at 1080p.
While the discovery of this hidden ‘Performance Mode’ is intriguing, it also raises some interesting points. For example, the performance gap between 1080p and 4K can likely be attributed to NVIDIA DLSS, which upscales images from a lower resolution to 4K. The roughly 10% performance difference during tests could very well reflect the performance cost of DLSS when scaling from 1080p to 4K.
Moreover, the game’s instant resolution change when the system’s resolution is altered suggests the existence of a hidden feature within the Nintendo Switch 2 itself. Digital Foundry experts pointed out that IO Interactive could have easily provided these display mode options in the game’s menu if they had intended for them to be directly accessible. As the first handheld console to feature NVIDIA DLSS, the Nintendo Switch 2’s technical capabilities continue to surprise as users dig deeper into its hidden features.
For more details on the new Nintendo console, check out Chris’s review.
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