The Switch 2’s port of Hitman: World of Assassination has a secret, undocumented “performance mode” that can push its frame rate up to 60 FPS, all by simply tweaking your console’s front-end menu settings. This isn’t an in-game option you can just toggle on; it’s a hidden gem that significantly boosts performance, making your assassination missions smoother than ever.
This interesting discovery actually started with an email to Richard Leadbetter from Harry Mingham, who noticed that by changing the Switch 2’s TV output resolution from 4K to 720p, the game’s performance vastly improved. He found that the Hawkes Bay Mission, which typically hovered around 30-45 FPS, became “very solid and stable,” even hitting a locked 60 FPS in some less demanding areas, though it can still dip into the mid-40s during more intense scenes.
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This is a pretty wild find, especially since there’s no official mention of such a mode anywhere in the game. To really dig into this, tests were run on various scenes from Paris, Mumbai, Berlin, and Whittleton Creek, capturing data at 720p, 1080p, and 4K output resolutions, as dictated by the Switch’s system settings.
Berlin and Whittleton Creek are known to be GPU-intensive, while Paris and Mumbai, with their dense crowds of NPCs, are more likely to highlight any CPU limitations. The results, as you can imagine, were pretty eye-opening.
When you move to the CPU-intensive stages like Paris and Mumbai, filled to the brim with NPCs, the performance differences between the resolutions shrink considerably. In those packed fashion show areas of Paris, for example, the frame rates converge: 42 FPS at 720p, 39 FPS at “1080p,” and 35 FPS at “4K.” Here, the bottleneck shifts from the GPU to the CPU. The same goes for Mumbai; the CPU becomes the limiting factor in busy areas, so dropping the resolution doesn’t give you as big a boost.
It really feels like these resolution and frame rate shifts aren’t entirely intended. You’d expect a “performance mode” to be an actual in-game option, not something you stumble upon by messing with system settings. While it’s not unheard of for game modes to be tied to system settings (the PS4 Pro used to do this with its 1080p and 4K modes), seeing these changes kick in dynamically during gameplay, rather than just at boot-up, is a new one for a home console.
