We’ve not had the chance to play every Switch 2 game in-depth owing to the sheer volume of them and regrettably, one of the titles we’ve not been able to look at in depth is Io Interactive’s classic Hitman: World of Assassination. That’s a bit of a shame as it has a fascinating characteristic – its rendering resolution and performance changes according to how the Switch 2’s front-end menus are set, leading to anything up to a 62.5 percent performance increase based on our testing. There’s no in-game mention of this and certainly no in-game performance mode and yet there it is.
The story begins with an email I received last month from Harry Mingham: “Hitman: World of Assassination on Switch 2 runs around 30-45 fps around 90 percent of the time. Out of curiosity, I went into the system settings and changed the TV output res from 4K to 720p, went back into the game and found it vastly improves performance. The Hawkes Bay Mission ran at… a very solid and stable frame-rate”. In fact, depending on the content, Hitman: World of Assassination can run at up to 60 frames per second with the console set to 720p, dropping into the mid 40s on more demanding scenes.
In putting this to the test, I chose to capture scenes from Paris, Mumbai, Berlin and Whittleton Creek at 720p, 1080p and 4K resolution – as dictated by the Switch front-end. Based on prior testing on other systems, I’ve found Berlin and Whittleton Creek to be GPU-intensive, while the proliferation of NPCs in Paris and Mumbai may help us to identify areas where Switch 2 may be CPU-limited. The results are intriguing.
Focusing on Whittleton Creek gives us our biggest frame-rate differentials. 4K averages 40.45fps, rising to 46.88fps with Switch 2 set to 1080p, rising again to 59.93fps at 720p. So, performance increases by 9.7 percent dropping from 4K to 1080p (which sounds a little low), while 720p is 62.5 percent ahead of 4K and 48.2 percent faster than 1080p. So, what’s going on? Well, setting the system to 720p seems to be producing a straight 720p image, allowing for a much higher frame-rate.