- Our engineers partnered with IO Interactive
on their Hitman franchise
to deliver more realistic animations,
expanded in-game physics capabilities
and better balancing of workloads
across the CPU and GPU on high-performance gaming systems.
This helps IO Interactive deliver some
of the greatest gaming experiences in the world.
(dramatic music)
Let me introduce Maurizio De Pascale,
chief technology officer of IO Interactive
to tell you more about that work.
Maurizio, congratulations on the success of Hitman 3.
- Hey Roger. Thank you.
Yes, indeed, the game has been a great success so far.
It's been received beautifully, both critically
and also commercially it's doing extremely strong
and there's more coming.
We definitely see the game as a service
so we plan to bring more updates and more content
to our gamers throughout the year.
- You know, Agent 47 is one of those iconic characters.
You know, one of the most iconic characters
in all the video games.
How would you say he has evolved over the years?
- That's a good question.
He is probably on a bit of a journey to become more human.
So when we started, 47 was really kind of meant
as a clean slate,
someone that you could just see yourself into,
but I think starting with Absolution
and definitely with the last trilogy,
we're going more and more into storytelling.
We want to tell larger stories, better stories
and generally, you know, tell you more about 47.
- Maurizio, we've had a technical collaboration
with your team for many years,
working on animation systems, physics, visual content,
and really ensuring the game looks great
on our CPUs and GPUs,
and it scales across hundreds of millions of devices.
- Indeed, it's a collaboration that has been adding
so much value to the game.
Again, I can call out the better animations
that we've been able to add.
More MPCs and, you know, being updated at a higher frequency
and farther in the distance, the physics, you know,
the amount of physics that we added back on Hitman 2
in the race crash, for instance,
and also in Hitman 3,
in sections of the level there are distractables.
Those are really kind of highlights for the gamers as well.
And now there's more, as I was also mentioning before,
there's more to come, and working with your engineers,
we're working on bringing ray tracing into the games
and onto the, you know, the new hardware
that you guys are releasing later the year.
So it has been pretty much both a pleasure
to have this collaboration
and it's definitely adding value to the game.
- Yeah, we're really excited by that.
And, you know, we appreciate how this partnership
is going to really help us push
what the gaming experience is in the future,
and you know, you kind of talked about this a little bit,
but Intel has put a lot of investment in graphics recently.
I mean, we've quadrupled the performance
of our integrated graphics products
in the span of two years.
What are your thoughts
on Intel bringing performance graphics to the market?
- [Maurizio] I think the push you guys are doing
in graphics is really great
because, I mean, you have such a market penetration
that when you raise the bar,
it really raises the bar for the entire industry, right?
And now, you know, you can literally take Hitman
on a Intel Evo laptop,
and even if you're on a flight over the ocean,
you can actually still play Hitman
and, you know, enjoy great games with great graphics.
There's no compromises anymore.
- Great, so you know, we're really looking forward
to Project 007.
I loved Hitman 2.
I haven't started Hitman 3 yet,
but it's next in my queue,
but thank you for your time, Maurizio.
It's always great to see you
and congratulations to your team for all the great work.
- Thank you, Roger, I will definitely relay, you know,
the congratulations to the team,
and make sure that you grab the PC and play Hitman 3
because you're gonna have a lot of fun.
(dramatic music)