Agent 47 is holed up in a hotel somewhere in Paris. He has been shot and is heavily doped up on painkillers. He's in a ghastly state and is both hallucinating and suffering from nightmarish flashbacks. This is where the missions in Hitman: Contracts come into play, as each one is designed to be a flashback to a previous hit from 47's past.

Every mission in the game use a structure that's similar to those in past Hitman games, thus giving you multiple objectives and multiple ways to achieve them. At his disposal, 47 has more than 30 firearms and a host of new melee weapons and attacks, including new sneak attacks for stealth killing.

To speak the truth I expected more from the 3rd revision of this game. Even though I really enjoyed Hitman 1, I found boring and awkward the next 2 sequels. But Hitman: Contracts differentiates from the previous games for its awesome graphics. You have to play this game to see what I mean. I was staring in awe those fabulous weather effects haven't seen something alike in any other game.

But the real reason I involved Hitman: Contracts in our benchmark suite is it's very requiring Post Filtering quality setting. This game uses a unique post filtering system with complicated blurring effects. And as you can see yourselves it really stretches even the latest GPUs making it a very good benchmark.

- Benchmarking Settings
Unfortunately the game doesn't have a decent benchmark process or a demo recording capability. Thus I played manually a part of a stage that I found suitable. The stage is named "Beldingford Manor" and it has very spectacular rain effects. For the sake of VGA benchmarking Agent 47 storms at a scottish manor eliminating whatever gets in his way.

Firstly I played the stage in 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions without having the quality settings (post filtering, anisotropic) enabled. I played again the same stage doing the same thing, but this time with Anisotropic and high Post filtering settings enabled.

The X800 XT had no problem at all rendering Hitman's 3D engine. But as said before the reason I picked this game is it's very requiring Post Filtering method. So let's see what happens with the Post Filtering set at high.

Here the X800 XT shows it's teeth. The smooth performance achieved in all resolutions is really incredible. Check out the fps at the 1600x1200 resolution! The X800 outperforms the 6800 Ultra for 30 fps! Again I kept staring in awe during the benchmark.