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 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 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. I haven't seen anything like it in any other game.

But the real reason I included Hitman: Contracts in our benchmark suite is it's very demanding post filtering quality setting. This game uses a unique post filtering system with complicated bluring effects. And as you can see for yourselves, it really extends 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 at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions without having the quality settings (post filtering, anisotropic) enabled. I again played the same stage doing the same thing, but this time with Anisotropic and High Post filtering enabled.

Now let's see if Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra will pass this test ...

Interesting results. It seems that ATI chipsets are good at this game. But let's see what happens when Post Filtering was enabled.

It's pretty amazing how this game's Post Filtering technique manages to break down the performance of the most powerful VGA chipsets. But it seems that for CoolFX 6800 Ultra it is no problem to render. It is worth noting though that it dropped its fps down to 42 when at the 1600x1200 resolution with the very demanding Post Filtering on.

Agent 47 at work