Conclusion
Hitman 2 is a continuation of the concepts introduced in the previous Hitman. IO Interactive did a great job crafting a living game world that has tons of objects you can interact with to accomplish your goal—take down your target. Unlike the first title, the game's episodic format has been replaced with a more complete story. While the options and mechanics might feel overwhelming at first, if you give the game some time, you'll definitely enjoy it.
Visual fidelity is good, certainly not the best we've ever seen from a PC title, slightly improved over the previous Hitman, but not in a dramatic way. What's a huge change is that unlike the 2016 version, Hitman 2 no longer supports DirectX 12. It looks like the developer didn't want to waste time and money on supporting both rendering APIs at the same time (they are fundamentally different in terms of development concepts). While it's certainly sad to see DX12 go, it looks like that's where the industry is heading. Most new titles just use the tested and well understood DirectX 11 API, probably to reduce development costs—there seems to be no place for a somewhat romantic notion of supporting the latest and greatest tech. No, game publishers want their titles out quickly so they can get return on their investment—nothing else matters.
The amount of settings options has also been reduced a bit. While acceptable, it would have been nice to see some additional dials for fine-tuning performance, especially on weaker graphics cards. We tested VRAM usage and it's very reasonable; for 1080p, a 3 GB graphics card will not run into any trouble with highest details memory-wise. For higher resolutions, the requirements are pretty low because every recent graphics card that can drive 1440p or 4K has 8 GB VRAM or more. It would have been nice to see some higher-res texture options for those cards.
Overall performance is "demanding"—a GTX 1060 or RX 580 can't even get close to 60 FPS at 1080p. Especially AMD cards seem to be at a disadvantage at lower resolutions, possibly due to the removal of DirectX 12, which gave those cards a speed boost. What's interesting is that as you dial up the resolution, AMD cards gain quickly on their NVIDIA counterparts. Higher resolutions have similar requirements: a GTX 1070 Ti / 1080 / 2070 will give you a great 60 FPS gaming experience at 1440p, and for 4K, the RTX 2080 Ti should be your weapon of choice.
We chose to not use the game's integrated benchmark since its yielding unrealistic performance numbers. We also used a proper public version and not the cracked pre-release build that was leaked one week before the game's official launch.
If you liked the first Hitman, then picking up Hitman 2 should be a no-brainer. If you're not sure whether it's a game for you, then consider checking out the first Hitman, which should be available at much better pricing, to get a feel for what the series is about and to learn the game's mechanics. On the other hand, purchasing Hitman 2 will give you all the missions of Hitman 1, too, so if you think you'll end up buying both, maybe consider just buying Hitman 2.