By: The Button Man
Video Settings
This varies greatly from video card to video card, but I'll cover the
basics. You should be able to change settings on your 3D accelerator
relatively easily. The usual ways of doing this is either by an
applet supplied with your video drivers, or from "Display Settings"
(right click the Desktop, select "Properties", "Settings", and "Advanced").
I have a GeForce, so I'll use this as a basic example. The Tweaking Applet
lets you change the various settings on the card. First, it would be
advisable to select all performance enhancing tweaks (there are always
some, usually that allow the use of extra buffers, or memory regions).
You'll also have a choice in Quality Options. Obviously, with slower PCs,
you should select lower qualities, and vice versa with faster chips.
But you'll still have to strike a balance. If you don't have a particularly
fast 3D card (by todays standards), you may not want to run in highest
quality, no matter what your PC is.
Therefore, it is often best to start off with the medium option,
in the case of the GeForce (and DirectX mipmapping), blend. If your card
has anti-aliasing, I'd suggest that, unless you get stupidly high frames
per second, you either leave it off, or leave it on the lowest level of
anti-aliasing. Personally, I leave it off. Why? More on that later.
Hitman Setup
Hitman has a setup utility, which you need to launch the first time you
run the game. Rather annoyingly, it needs the CD in, but hey!
So, first we need to select an API. The game does come with a list of
supported APIs for different graphics cards. Basically, if you can, select
OpenGL (for example, any nVidia Graphics card, except perhaps the GeForce3,
where you should have DX8 installed, and use that). If you're running a
3DFX card, select Glide, since this is the proprietory API for them.
Other cards may have other restrictions (e.g. Matrox cards can only use
DirectX), so check in the file supplied with the game.
You will almost certainly want the game to run full screen, and select
texture compression if your card supports it (certainly the GeForce and
the Matrox cards should). This will improve texture quality in the game,
and really should make no performance difference.
As for resolution - well, with PIIs, you really don't want to go above
800x600, unless you have the meatiest graphics card around. There is some
argument as to whether the game actually supports T&L engines, and it's
something I can't directly answer. If it doesn't, you'll notice a
significant performance decrease each time you up the resolution, which is
something I have noticed happening. However, if your graphics card is
good enough, you should be able to ramp the resolution up a bit. With a
PIII, you should be able to comfortably raise the resolution to
1024x768 and above.
Bit depth will also effect your performance, since 32bit textures are
larger than 16bit textures. Some cards (certainly the early 3DFX cards)
are optimised for 16bit textures, and some won't use 32bit textures.
Basically, however, your choice should be dependant on how well the game
performs so far. If all is well, try 32bit, if not, expect a reasonable
performance boost from swapping down to 16bit textures.
