Glacier is the proprietary game engine IO Interactive developed for its modern Hitman trilogy, then evolved substantially for 007 First Light. The version shipping with 007 First Light is the same engine family, modernised across the board to support fully real-time global illumination, dynamic volumetric weather, dynamic brick streaming, and stronger crowd presentation. This article summarises the engine work IO Interactive publicly discussed in the lead-up to launch.
Engine Lineage
Glacier originated as IO Interactive's in-house engine and was used across the Hitman 2 (2018) through the World of Assassination relaunch. The 007 First Light version is built on the same architecture but with substantial rework. The studio frames it as an evolution rather than a new engine.
Modernised Lighting
The most visible change is the lighting model. The previous Hitman pipeline relied on a simpler real-time-plus-baked-bounce approach. The 007 First Light pipeline uses fully real-time global illumination, with bounce light updating from dynamic sources rather than baked probes. The benefit is consistent lighting across time-of-day shifts, weather changes, and interactive set pieces that the older pipeline would have struggled to recompute on the fly.
Volumetric Systems (Smolder)
IO Interactive built an in-house volumetric system called Smolder for 007 First Light. Smolder handles the volumetric fog, smoke columns, dust kicked up by gunfire and vehicles, weather effects, and the soft light shafts that come through architectural windows. It works alongside the new lighting model so that a smoke pod thrown during combat affects light, occlusion, and silhouette consistently rather than reading as a 2D overlay.
Dynamic Brick Streaming
The mission spaces in 007 First Light are larger and more variable than the sandbox levels of the Hitman trilogy. To support that, the engine streams its level data in fixed-size bricks that the world manager swaps in and out as the camera moves. The studio described this as a replacement for the older fixed level-load approach, in which an entire mission was paged into memory at the start. The brick model allows IO Interactive to design longer linear mission paths and larger sandbox spaces without long mid-mission loads.
Frame Graph Render System
At the core of the renderer is a Frame Graph system that orchestrates resources and render passes per frame. The Frame Graph keeps track of which resources are alive between passes, when they can be aliased to save memory, and how render passes can be reordered to avoid stalls. On PlayStation 5 the renderer schedules up to four async compute pipelines in parallel to keep the GPU constantly utilised between draw calls.
Performance Targets
Platform | Performance mode | Quality mode |
|---|---|---|
PlayStation 5 | 60 fps | 30 fps with higher fidelity |
PlayStation 5 Pro | 60 fps quality (single mode) | Same single mode |
Xbox Series X | 60 fps | 30 fps with higher fidelity |
Xbox Series S | 30 fps only | No 60 fps mode |
PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both offer a choice between a 60 fps Performance mode and a 30 fps Quality mode that pushes resolution and rendering fidelity. PlayStation 5 Pro uses a single mode that targets 60 fps at the higher fidelity tier (no separate Quality and Performance split). Xbox Series S runs at 30 fps only. IO Interactive cited the Series S RAM and GPU budget as the reason a 60 fps mode was not pursued on that platform.
PC Scaling
On PC the engine scales across five published hardware tiers, from 1080p at 30 fps on the Minimum tier up to 4K at 200 fps and beyond on the Ultra tier. The Ultra tier reaches its targets with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation enabled on an RTX 5080. The Minimum, Recommended, and Enthusiast tiers are stated as native targets. The full breakdown lives in the PC System Requirements article.
Post-Launch Path Tracing
Path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction are not in the May 27, 2026 launch build. IO Interactive committed to delivering both in a Summer 2026 update. The 4K-200-fps tier uses the standard rasterisation pipeline plus DLSS Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation at launch; the path-traced version of the lighting model rolls in with the Summer update.
Crowd And NPC Density
IO Interactive specifically called out crowd density as an area where the new engine surpasses the Hitman trilogy. Set pieces with high-density populated environments (galas, busy plazas, market crowds) draw more NPCs at higher fidelity, each with their own animation set and reaction behaviour. The pipeline keeps NPC budgets predictable on consoles by leaning on dynamic level-of-detail and the brick streaming model.
Related Articles
PC System Requirements - hardware tiers, NVIDIA features, and platform-side performance scaling.
Day One Patch - storage requirements and install footprint per platform.
Stealth and Bluff System - how the new lighting and crowd density feed into stealth gameplay.