After being an Epic Games exclusive for its first year, HITMAN III launched on Steam last week. While there isn't a native Linux port for HITMAN 3, it does run wonderful under Steam Play with Proton for enjoying this Windows game on Linux complete with Vulkan API rendering. Here are some initial benchmarks of HITMAN 3 on Linux with NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards.

[1]

While the original HITMAN saw a port to Linux by Feral Interactive, HITMAN 2 did not nor HITMAN 3. But at least these newer titles in the HITMAN franchise do run great with Steam Play. HITMAN 3 was developed by IO Interactive using their Glacier Engine. Due to it running well on Steam Play and the game working well for automated-benchmark purposes just as with the earlier HITMAN games, I've spent a few days running benchmarks on the new release.

[2]

IO Interactive's system requirements for HITMAN 3 on Windows put it at a minimum of a Core i5 2500K / Phenom II X3 940, 8GB of RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon HD 7870 or newer. The recommend system specs though are at least an Intel Core i7 4790, 16GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 / AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. Even for being released last January, the system specs aren't too elevated.

[3]

For this initial look at the HITMAN 3 Linux performance, it was tested with a variety of modern NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards using the latest Linux drivers: NVIDIA 495.46 and on the AMD side was the Linux 5.16 AMDGPU kernel driver with Mesa 22.0-devel from the Oibaf PPA. The range of graphics cards tested included:

- GTX 1650 SUPER

- RTX 2060 SUPER

- RTX 2080 Ti

- RTX 3060

- RTX 3070

- RTX 3080

- RTX 3080 Ti

- RTX 3090

- RX 5700 XT

- RX Vega 56

- Radeon VII

- RX 590

- RX 6600

- RX 6600 XT

- RX 6700 XT

- RX 6800

- RX 6800 XT

Most fascinating with the results is how well the performance is out of the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with HITMAN 3 and stronger than NVIDIA RTX 30 series with their proprietary Vulkan driver. While not having a Radeon RX 6900 XT for testing (never received a review sample), the RX 6800 XT with HITMAN 3 could even outperform the GeForce RTX 3090.

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Let's look at these initial HITMAN 3 Linux benchmarks on Steam Play.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=hitman-3-linux&image=hitman3_linux_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=hitman-3-linux&image=hitman3_linux_2_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=hitman-3-linux&image=hitman3_linux_3_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=hitman-3-linux&image=hitman3_linux_4_lrg