Hitman 3 is Stuttering and Freezing – How to fix

Hitman 3 Stuttering and Freezing – It looks like players are constantly facing micro stutters and freezes in Hitman 3. Here is a guide consisting of various fixes that might help you solve the issue.

How to fix Stuttering and Freezing issues in Hitman 3

Can your PC run Hitman 3?

Is your PC capable enough to run Hitman 3 smoothly? The first thing you need to check, before you go ahead and try the fixes below, is whether the specifications of your PC are somewhat identical to the system requirements of Hitman. Here are the requirements:

As you can see, you need a GTX 660 or an AMD Radeon HD 7870 to play the game at the lowest possible settings. And don’t think that you would be able to play at 1080p resolution. 720p or probably 900p are your only options. To get 60 FPS on 1920×1080 resolution at high settings, you need a GTX 1070 or a RX Vega 56.

Eliminate resource-hogging background applications and services

A lot of you might not have any idea, but there are many applications that often tend to eat up a huge chunk of RAM without you knowing anything about it. Few months ago there was a Windows 10 update that was causing the WindowsSearch and Cortana to use almost 70-80% of CPU. As a result people started facing huge lag, fps drops, etc, in almost every game. Eventually the issue got fixed but the time taken by Microsoft to fix it was pretty long.

So check whether you have useless applications running in the background or not. You can also decide which applications you want to automatically start when you boot your system and prevent the useless ones from starting.

• Open Task Manager
• Click on the Startup tab
• Keep the applications that are important, Enabled
• Disable the rest

Disable Xbox Game Bar

It has been a while since Microsoft introduced the Xbox Game Bar feature on Windows 10. Sadly it still causes fps drops in some games. I am not sure if your stuttering in Hitman 3 has anything to do with the game bar or not, but it is better to keep it off. Here is how to do it:

1. Open Windows 10 Settings menu
2. Click on Gaming
3. Select Xbox Game Bar from the left sidebar
4. Turn it off
5. Restart your game launcher

Windows Game Mode

If you are a Windows 10 user then you should definitely try using the Game Mode feature in Windows 10. When configured correctly, the Game Mode will block useless notifications from various applications, you would be able to see how much CPU and GPU a game is using and of course there are other cool features as well.

Also, Game mode prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications and it also helps your system towards achieving more stable frame rates depending on the specific game and system.

How to turn on Game Mode

Here is how to turn on Game Mode:

• Press the Start button
• Click on Settings
• Select Gaming
• Now select Game Mode for the side bar
• Turn Game Mode On

Hitman 3 – Nvidia Control Panel settings

The first thing you should do is click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings and make sure that ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘ is selected. Now:

• Open Nvidia Control Panel
• Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
• Click on the Program Settings tab
• Locate Hitman 3 from the drop down menu under “Select a program to customize”
  
• If you don’t see the game on the list then click on the Add button and another list will appear
• If you still cannot spot the game then you need to add the .exe file manually.
• Click on Browse
• Locate the folder where you have installed the game
  
• Select the executable file or the .exe file which in this case should be hitman3.exe
  
• Once you have successfully added the game, you will then see the program settings become available for the game
  
• Now tweak the following settings:
  Threaded Optimization : On
  Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
  Low Latency Mode : Off
  Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

Hitman 3 – AMD Control Panel settings

Right-click on your desktop and click on AMD Radeon Software. Click on the Gaming tab and click on Global Graphics. Set your Graphics Profile to “eSport”. Now tweak the following settings:

• Radeon Anti-Lag : Disabled
• Radeon Chill : Disabled
• Boost : Disabled
• Image Sharpening : Disabled
• Enhanced Sync : Disabled
• Vertical Refresh : Always Off

Now click on Advanced. Tweak the following settings:

• Anti-Aliasing : Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method : Multi-sampling
• Morphological Anti-Aliasing : Disabled
• Anisotropic Filtering : Disabled
• Texture Filtering Quality : Performance
• Surface Format Optimization : Enabled
• Tessellation Mode : Override application settings
• Maximum Tessellation Level : Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering : Disabled
• GPU Workload : Graphics

Now reset the Shader Cache by hitting Performance Reset at the bottom of the list.

Try Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling

If you have the latest build of Windows 10 (2004) then you should make use of the brand new feature called hardware-accelerated gpu scheduling. If you have a decent graphics card then you might actually benefit from this. Here is how to turn it on:

1. Go to Windows 10 settings
2. Click on System
3. Select the Display tab on the left
4. Scroll down and you will notice an option called Graphics Settings at the bottom
5. Click on it
6. Turn on Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling

Graphics performance preference

The Graphics Settings menu has another awesome feature that allows you to set a graphics performance preference for a particular app. Here is how to do it:

• Set “Choose an app to set preference” to Desktop app
• Click on browse
• Go the installation folder of Hitman 3
• Select the .exe file or the executable
• Click on Options once the .exe file is added
• Choose High Performance
• Restart your PC

These are all the fixes we have for the performance issues in Hitman 3 at the moment. All the steps listed are basic steps and does not require you to take any advanced measures. Some of these steps or methods might work for you but nothing is guaranteed.

If you think this guide had helped you then let us know in the comment section below. Also, if you are facing other problems with the game then try checking out our other guides on Hitman 3. Who knows, you might end up finding a fix.

That’s all folks!

Last Updated on January 19, 2021

Shoaib

Shoaib, 30, is a simple guy who loves to play video games, and enjoys new cuisines sporadically. He has been gaming since he was 7 years old, and with an experience of 22 years, under his belt, there is not a single AAA game in this world, that he hasn’t played. Despite being a MBA Graduate he decided to follow his passion. And because of his love for gaming, Frondtech came into existence.