HITMAN 3 Will Now Launch On Intel GPUs Under Linux After Hiding The GPU Vendor

While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used.

The Intel ANV Vulkan driver has had to hide the fact that Intel graphics are being used originally for Cyberpunk 2077 as a XeSS-enabled game otherwise it would crash. Hogwarts Legacy was another affected game that was held up by trying to use XeSS with Intel graphics on Linux. Last month The Finals was another problematic game. Now HITMAN 3 is concealing the Intel Vulkan vendor in order to avoid the XeSS problem.

With this merge hitting Mesa 24.1 today, the vendor ID is overriden when "hitman3.exe" is encountered as a process name to be able to successfully launch the game and avoid an "Intel Plugin Extension ERROR: INTC_LoadExtensionsLibrary failed" error.

While Intel is typically great with their Linux and open-source contributions, these XeSS issues have been an unfortunate problem. It's also unfortunate XeSS is not open-source.