FRANKFURT, Germany – Sept. 13, 2018 – Performance in Hunt: Showdown gets a big boost this month with the release of Update 2.4, which focuses on performance-related additions and changes to the multiplayer FPS bounty hunting game from Crytek. Additionally, the new solo mode, which proved to be highly popular during the game’s recent Solo Event, is here to stay.
Performance upgrades in 2.4 are manifold, and in a new video interview Level Design Director Chris Auty and Technical Director Sebastien Laurent discuss the performance updates in 2.4 in detail, while Senior Game Designer Andreas Liebeskind and Junior Technical Designer Bence Kovacs weigh in on the new weapons, content updates, and game fixes. Many details are covered in the eight-minute video, which can be viewed here:
Changes to the game’s graphics settings offer one of the biggest potential improvements to performance, as rendering has been split out into different quality settings, allowing players to make choices about things like shadow quality or particle quality fitting to their specific machine. Players with limited GPU performance should see the biggest benefits from this change. Resolution scaling is another big feature now available with 2.4. Originally introduced in Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome, resolution scaling decouples display resolution with rendering resolution, significantly improving performance on the GPU level. CPU optimizations were also made on the game code side, and this should result in significantly less stalling. Level loading times should also improve.
Three new weapons are also packed into Update 2.4. The new Nagant Officer M1895 Carbine pistol has a long barrel and a stock, which means it behaves more like a rifle than a pistol. The new Specter 1882 Compact Shotgun has a sawn-off barrel, foregrip, and wider spread (if shorter range). The Crossbow Shotbolt mixes the characteristics of a shotgun with those of a crossbow, utilizing bolts tipped with shotgun shells that detonate on impact, setting off a cone of shotgun pellets.