Hitman 2 (2018) on the GPD Win Max (Manjaro)

Hitman 2 (2018) on the GPD Win Max (Manjaro)

I've been slowly putting the Win Max through its paces, mostly by sitting in my living room or in bed before sleeping playing through some games I never got a chance to play through.

I have several of the older Hitman titles, and they run well as can be expected, but looking at these games made me curious how well –if at all– one of the newer titles in this series would run on the Win Max. I wanted to try Hitman (2016), but for some reason unbeknownst to me this pack costs a relative fortune on Steam. Or I think it does. IO Interactive switched to an episodic approach, which is fine, but trying to figure out exactly which set comes with what is an exercise in patience, to say the least.

Anyway, I digress. I purchased Hitman 2 (2018), and installed it on the Win Max.


After making some configuration changes (detailed below), I played through the first mission which ran absolutely fantastic, with solid framerate and very consistent frametime. It's a quiet mission with a relatively small amount of characters roaming around though, so not a stress test by any means. But regardless of that, I was amazed it ran this well, and I had a blast playing through the level.

But the real test is the second mission, set in Miami at a racetrack. With a positively gargantuan amount of characters walking around, this level can even bring a sweat to higher end PC setups. So if this level is playable, I'd wager the entire game is.

What follows is a recording I made this morning of the Maimi mission.

As you can see, performance isn't 100% consistent in this demanding level, but in my opinion feels very playable. Last night I played this level for the first time, and managed to take out both targets and roam around a large part of this map without issue.


Configuration

The Win Max is running a fully up-to-date Manjaro 20.2.1 running on the Linux 5.10.13-2 kernel, with the recent-most Mesa drivers at the time of writing (21.1.0-devel git-76538f83c). I'm using Proton 5.21-GE-1 (the GloriousEggroll proton fork) for this game, and the game itself is the Steam version.

The device's TDP has been limited to 15 watt, turbo boost has been disabled, and undervolting has been applied (CPU -80mV, GPU -100mV, CPU Cache -70mV).

Set at the Max' native screen resolution (1280x800) with all game settings set to low, and v-sync interval set to 2. This limits the framerate to 30fps, even though Mangohud still shows it as 60fps. This is presumably due to the way the game has implemented this specific option.

I have super sampling set to 0.75 to have the internal resolution of the game at 75%. The latter is not possible through the in-game settings, but easily achieved using regedit. With protontricks installed, run protontricks 863550 regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > SOFTWARE > IO Interactive > Hitman 2, and double click on the value called SuperSampling. Select the Decimal radio button, and enter 750 as the value. Hit ok, and close the registry editor. Done!

Do note that once you have done this, you should no longer use the game's pre-launch options screen, as that will reset the super sampling value to 1. You can still use the in-game graphics settings screen, so long as you don't try to modify the super sampling value of course.


So far I have only played the first two missions, but it's been an absolute blast. If you're familiar with the Hitman series you'll know that each mission also has a ton of replayability, as there's many ways you can go about achieving your goals, and even side goals you can do as-well. I'd consider this game to be very playable, although it is pushing the limits of the Max. There is no doubt that with just a bit more leg room you'd at least be able to get a constant 30fps, but especially in less crowded areas like the oh-so-busy Miami mission, you'll already get this solid framerate on the Max.

Pretty amazing.


GPD Max

GPD Pocket 2