This modern remake of that legendary tale offers extensive graphical settings and accessibility options. It can be tweaked and run raytraced, and the controls are just how you like them. The monsters will keep coming and coming with surprise encounters, but after a short period of time, the game becomes a little boring. The game relies too much on its repetitive and violent encounters, but that is not the only problem.
Unfortunately, Silent Hill 2 stutters much like many Unreal Engine 5 games. With this game and others based on Unreal Engine 5, you can experience significant swings in the frame-time graph or stuttering when compiling the shader, but that is not the case for Silent Hill 2.
However, transversal stuttering is present and can be highly problematic. The problem is similar to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but you cannot stabilize performance for a smooth and consistent experience in Silent Hill 2.
PC Additions for Silent Hill 2
The recommended requirements are Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X. The game offers unique RT features that can only be found on the PC version, and it looks excellent overall. There are even a few surprises, like support for console-style dynamic resolution scaling, although it is limited to the TSR upscaler.
Adding the ray tracing toggle option in the PC version produces far superior reflections and more accurate indirect lighting. This allows you to go beyond the PlayStation 5 (PS5) version of the game, where consoles tend to use Lumen software for diffuse global illumination and reflections, and PCs usually don’t offer hardware Lumens.
Some notable problems or glitches are that almost all in-game fabrics run at 30fps, regardless of the target frame rate, making curtains or flags fluttering in the wind look weird and awkward. Also, the cutscenes surprisingly lock to 30fps while using the Unreal Engine 5’s frame-rate cap.
Lumen Versus DLSS Ray Tracing
Lumen hardware generally looks better, but bugs such as grass flickering or the entire presentation can flicker momentarily during the game. The Lumen reflections suffer from poor denoising, which exhibits noticeable boiling effects while moving leaves, which can leave traces behind.
The PC community attempted to fix this with mods, and DLSS ray tracing was brought to the game to solve the problem of lumen denoising. DLSS .dll swap-outs can fix trailing leaves. PC modders are making the best of the situation and trying to improve the game. Hopefully, Bloober will take inspiration from this. But don’t expect modders to fix Unreal Engine 5’s perennial stuttering issues. These are ongoing, fundamental Unreal Engine issues requiring a software fix.
It is harder to gauge the exact length of the stutters there due to the hindrance of vertical sync, but they are very noticeable in the game’s 30fps mode. However, the PS5 overall frame-rate difference is much lower. The PS5 can also appear to spread cross-sectional stuttering over a longer period, so it is more of a series of smaller stutters than one large spike, as seen on PC.
30 fps Frame Limits
With a frame rate limited to 30 fps and new frames being delivered constantly, the PC version of Silent Hill 2 still stutters. By artificially limiting the game to a lower frame rate and using higher CPU performance to contain the stuttering within a frame refresh has been attempted by some players. However, these attempts fail to provide smooth performance, and animation stuttering is another critical issue with the Unreal Engine 5 that needs fixing.
The engine runs in “delta time,” which, in theory, should provide the same gameplay speed regardless of the frame rate. Testing has shown that if you disable this via the launch parameters and force Silent Hill 2 to run at 30fps, the problem has completely disappeared. Additionally, running the game at a higher frame rate will run at comically fast speeds, and this test shows that something is wrong with Silent Hill 2. This test fixed or limited the game to 30 fps, but it is not a viable solution.
What’s Next?
Unfortunately, something is very wrong in Silent Hill 2, and the fact that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor also had it is very problematic. Is it a Windows problem, an Unreal Engine 5 problem, or a combination of problems? Hopefully, Epic and the game developers will realize and eliminate the problem.
