Visuals

There may be less visual mods than you may be used to with a modded game, but there is good reason for that. The game has a pretty unoptimized renderer, built on now 20 year old DirectX 9.

Mesh replacers are often grossly unoptimized, which is disastrous, since the mesh pipeline is the main performance bottleneck.

ENBs may make for pretty screenshots, but they are near-impossible to play with due to the many bugs, performance problems, and vision-obscuring effects they use.

Texture mods often suffer from being inadequately oversized, which leads to wasteful memory usage and increased loading times and stutter. They also create a great disparity between the new textures and the vanilla textures, both in quality and in style, making for some jarring texture transitions or seams.

Creating a Separator in MO2

Right-click the empty space in the left pane of MO2 and select Create Separator.
Name the separator Visuals.

Faster Pip-Boy Animation

Installation instructions:

Main File - Faster Pip-Boy Animation (2x) 1.0

Doubles the speed of the Pip-Boy opening animation.

No Muzzle Flash Lights

Installation instructions:

Main File - No Muzzle Flash Lights

Disables the lights cast by muzzle flashes, which can greatly improve performance in combat.

This mod does not disable the actual muzzle flashes, but rather the lights the muzzle flashes cast on the environment. It also only disables the effect for NPCs by default, but that can be configured via the included INI file. See the mod's screenshots for details. Like any mod in the guide, it can be skipped if you like the effect and don't mind the performance hit.

Anniversary Animation Pack

Installation instructions:

Main File - Anniversary Anim Pack

Includes three of Hitman's previous animation mods, Subtle Camera Motion, Iron Sights Recoil Animations, and Fire Animation Variants, as well as some new previously unreleased animations.

Anniversary Anim Pack - General Bugfix

Installation instructions:

Main File - AnniAnimPack_BugFix 1.3
Main File - Bonus Patch (When prompted, rename to Anniversary Anim Pack - General Bugfix - Bonus Patch)

Fixes many bugs/inconsistencies in Anniversary Anims Pack.

B42 Weapon Inertia

Installation instructions:

Main File - B42 Inertia V1.2

Gives weapons realistic inertia movement.

Compatibility Skeleton

Installation instructions:

Optional File - NVCS Vanilla Weights

Allows multiple mods that edit the skeleton mesh to work together, required for B42 Weapon Inertia.

Improved LOD Noise Texture

Installation instructions:

Main File - Improved LOD noise Texture

Improves the generic LOD noise texture.

Pip-Boy Shading Fix NVSE

Installation instructions:

Main File - Pip-Boy Shading Fix

Fixes Pip-Boy's shading, making it not ignore lights around it.

Atmospheric Lighting Tweaks

Installation instructions:

Main File - Atmospheric Lighting Tweaks - FNV

Makes changes to Image Spaces and Lighting Templates to give interiors a more dynamic and atmospheric look.

Strip Street Light Corrections

Installation instructions:

Main File - Strip Street Light Corrections

Corrects several minor issues with the Strip's street lights.

Desert Natural Weathers

Installation instructions:

Main File - Desert Natural Weathers NV

Major overhaul to all of the weathers for the base game and DLCs.

As visual mods are very subjective, not everyone will like DN Weathers. If you want an alternatives, I recommend checking out Altitude, Yellow Goodbye, or Clarity. Yellow Goodbye and Clarity aim for a much more vanilla style, mostly just removing the game's atmospheric tint. Meanwhile, Altitude aims to strike a balance between staying vanilla-friendly and being a complete overhaul. These three mods should have little to no performance loss, even on lower-end systems.

A Little More Lamplight

Installation instructions:

Main File - A Little More Lamplight

Enhances the vanilla streetlights and adds new ones around Outer Vegas, Freeside, and more.

MoonlightNVSE

Installation instructions:

Main File - MoonlightNVSE

Fixes moonlight by making the moon the light caster instead of the sun.

High Resolution Bloom NVSE

Installation instructions:

Main File - High Resolution Bloom

Allows for customizable bloom resolution, making it possible to use resolutions other than vanilla's quarter one.