Hitman 3 - July 2021 Patch (3.50)

I have this issue since the July patch too. Stuttering on initial load of a level, when moving, panning camera, shooting, other moments of action, etc. Each time I install a new Nvidia driver. And the issue disappear after one hour or two. RTX 2080 here.

Technical Explanation :

In short, every time the game compiles a shader, a stutter appears. DX12 and Vulkan games need a shader cache to work without stuttering everytime a shader is compiled. Some games compile all the shaders when the game is launched but it can take several minutes. IO didn’t choose to do this to make the game start very quickly. They preferred to pre-compile the shaders, and include them in each update.

But I think this shader cache can’t be used by every computers, because it can vary depending on the hardware. So I think the cache that IO provides is not fully compatible with some GPU, so the game compiles the shaders itself during gameplay. And stutters ends up disappearing after 1 or 2 hours.

But you have to know that every time you reinstall your drivers or make a DDU, the cache is cleared and the game has to recompile everything from scratch. Cache clearing can also happen after a game update.

I know that Steam collects pre-compiled shaders from players and distributes them among those who have similar hardware. Thanks to this technique, shaders stuttering are mostly solved.

What I do before each driver update or game update, I make a backup of my shaders to avoid all of this. But this is something that developers and stores can fix.

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