NVIDIA/AMD Linux Gaming Performance For Hitman 2 On Steam Play

While Hitman was ported to Linux by Feral Interactive, Hitman 2 that was released back in November of 2018 hasn't seen a native Linux port. However, in recent months Hitman 2 has been running under DXVK+Proton with Steam Play for allowing this stealth video game to run nicely under Linux. More recently the latest Proton updates have worked around an issue that previously prevented our benchmarking of this game, so in this article is a look at the Hitman 2 Linux gaming performance with different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

The Windows version of Hitman 2 has been running great under Linux via Valve's Steam Play for months sans an issue with the benchmarking mode. But thankfully the latest Proton is working even better and thus when checking recently the game now ticks off all our requirements for being able to use it for automated and reliable benchmarking. Hitman 2 will thus be part of the additional Steam Play games featured in our forthcoming Linux GPU benchmark articles and driver comparisons while for this article is just a current look at the performance of the game on Linux with different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

Hitman 2 has been running great with Proton 4.2 atop Ubuntu 19.04 x86_64 as our initial test configuration while using the NVIDIA 430.09 driver and Linux 5.0 + Mesa 19.1-devel (LLVM 9.0; Padoka PPA), but the actual Steam Play driver requirements for this game are much more relaxed. Driver/software details of other user systems can be found via ProtonDB.

In my testing of this latest configuration, I didn't run into any rendering problems, the DXVK Vulkan performance was good, and only at 4K did I occasionally hit the game hanging on both RADV and NVIDIA but generally when restarting the game it would continue working fine.