MSI FX5950 Ultra - Page 12

Hitman Contracts

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 uses 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 be honest, 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 differs 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, the likes of which I haven't seen in any other game.

But the real reason I drafted Hitman: Contracts into 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 for yourselves, it really strains 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 FX5950 Ultra shows some of its quality in this benchmark. It can even output quite high fps at 1600x1200 resolution. Compared to the Asus beast, it's still close enough, which makes amends for some of the previous tests.

Here, the FX card shows it can keep up and give some good framerates at 1024x768 and 1280x1024. Both playable with average fps of over 25 in contrast to 1600x1200, where you can almost count the frames as they refresh on the screen.