IO Interactive's upcoming HITMAN game will feature a DirectX 12 renderer, according to a GDC 2016 session titled Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial Day: Rendering Hitman with DirectX 12 and held by Lead Render Programmer Jonas Meyer.

　　This talk will give a brief overview of how the Hitman Renderer works, followed by a deep dive into how we manage everything with DirectX 12, including Pipeline State Objects, Root Signatures, Resources, Command Queues and Multithreading.

Takeaway

　　The thing is, HITMAN hasn't been confirmed to have DirectX 12 support yet by Square Enix and IO Interactive. Then again, from the GDC 2016 schedule we learned that somehow two shipped games - Just Cause 3 and F1 2015 - already have DX12 enabled engines, even though the games don't actually support Microsoft's latest graphics API yet. It looks like Square Enix is the first major publisher to push in this direction, anyway, with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided already confirmed to feature full DirectX 12 integration.

　　There's still hope that HITMAN may support DX12 at launch, as Agent 47 is scheduled for his comeback on March 11 worldwide. By the way, IO Interactive recently announced that the game will be a "truly episodic game experience" with a "major live component".

　　Basically, at launch HITMAN will only feature the Prologue and Paris missions. The rest will be introduced gradually throughout the year, and gamers may choose between different options when purchasing the game.

　　The big change is that the next location, set in Italy, will now release in April and then Morocco will release in May. From there we will keep monthly content updates coming, including the three additional locations we have already announced; Thailand, the US and Japan until the season concludes in Japan later in 2016. The weekly live events and additional planned content will give you plenty to do in the time between location releases.

　　The new Intro Pack, which includes Prologue and Paris will be priced at $15. Each subsequent location can be purchased for $10 as an add-on item after you buy the new Intro Pack. If you buy the Intro Pack and want to get into everything the Full Experience offers, you can also choose to buy the Upgrade Pack for $50. This will give you access to all of the content released after March 11th and guarantees you won’t miss any live or bonus content.

　　Of course you can still buy the Full Experience which is the complete first season, so all the content this year as it’s released, up front for $60 as always promised. Whether you purchase the complete game or buy each episode individually, we want to remind the community that there will be no micro transactions in HITMAN.

　　If you prefer to wait we will also ship the complete season on a disc at the end of 2016.

　　How much are you interested in this new HITMAN title? Tell us in the comments.