Silent Hill 2 PC

I'm playing SH2 on PS2 (emulation) and it's brilliant, rendering at 12x native (8K) and it's soooooo good compared to native PS2 res:

PS2 native:
xFCusW8.jpeg


8K render res:
AqZi7K5.jpeg
 
JoeBoi said:
Managed to get half hour in, not feeling particularly great and I have been up on and off through out the night, finally waking up at 4. Otherwise, I would have continued.

Early thoughts, this remake is amazing, there is one thing currently bugging me though and it is the switch between 30fps and 60fps for cutscenes. Other than that, the stutters are not that frequent or annoying (in my experience).

Looking forward to getting stuck into this properly.
Click to expand...

Wait until you get to Wood Side Apartments, the reception area especially for some reason has a whacked out frametime graph which results in lower framerates than anywhere else:

ayp12ex.jpeg


Also when you're well into the streets after doing the jukebox it seems to stutter a bit more during the windy bit.

I can tolerate these though as they are no the massive ones like we see on Jedi Survivor.

I've been playing 2.2 hours so far and playing with mouse and KB feels responsive and intuitive in the game, though I do find the way the inventory is navigated and the map annoying as the movement is with the WASD keys. Enjoying it though, the atmosphere with modern fog and sound is awesome, especially through headphones.

Technical observation
  • There is no frame generation
  • DLSS dll version is 3.5.10, so be sure to manually swap the dll to the latest 3.7.20 and enable Preset E with DLSSTweaks for the best upscale quality
  • DLSS Performance for 4K output is perfectly nice quality, clean and crisp
  • There is no DLAA or NativeAA option, only UE's internal TAA if you opt to not use DLSS/FSR/XeSS.
  • Ray tracing seems to make the most difference on water reflections my removing the screen space reflections that go out of whack when the puddles go out of screen space. Otherwise anywhere else so far RT seems to only make a minimal difference it seems. RT has on average a 24fps hit on a 4090. IMGsli here. And for an indoor scene with light spill where RT on vs off shows a bigger difference, see here.
  • Average framerate for me seems to hover between 85fps and 105fps depending on area, it can fluctuate slightly above or slightly below this range. VRR sorts out the frametime inconsistency. Seems the frametime graph line is never truly flat like in other games, it's always a bit "alive" if that makes sense, see my video below:
  • There is no FOV slider
  • Because there is no Frame Gen, there is no Reflex
  • There is a texture AA mode which has FXAA/TXAA etc, even when you enable DLSS, cannot determine is this is actually being used when an upscaler is enabled
  • FSR1 and FSR3 feature, why the hell does it have FSR1 lol....
  • The FPS cap in game is only 30fps or 60fps and of course uncapped, you'll need to use GPU driver or RTSS to set a custom FPS cap if you want that above 60fps.
  • And 75fps+ the motion smoothness and mouse camera latency is perfectly fine which was nice to see, this is with a 1000Hz mouse
  • The level of texture detail and general lighting etc is excellent. There is some Lumen GI at play but not in all areas, like if you open the doorway in the loo at the start, light floods in and illuminates areas of the walls of the loo that would hit the light
  • In SDR (default gamma) pitch black areas are slightly faded black, not as faded as Wukong, but still faded. in HDR mode with the max luminance set to whatever mode the OLED is set to for HDR, and the "HDR Brightness" lowered slightly but not set to the lowest, pitch black areas are much darker than the faded black in SDR mode, though still not perfectly black which is still fine. In this mode the game looks good as many areas are very dark and this works well, although after further testing in SDR mode, I found I can replicate the HDR black level mentioned by setting the SDR gamma calibration to 1.6. Anyone on an OLED monitor should use either HDR and tweak the HDR brightness slider, or in SDR set the SDR gamma to 1.6 and then both will retain good black levels
  • The weird frametime issues seem to be gone when you get to Bluecreek Apartments and as such it's basically 100fps most of the time there now. This is definitely an optimisation issue as I can see at least 1 CPU core in Wood Side sitting at 1% so is obviously parked. Reminds me of Last of Us when that launched and had CPU optimisation issues until they patched it up. For me the 4090 is brute forcing its way through the lack of CPU multithreaded optimisation I'd say.
^^ The HDR quality version may not have processed yet on YouTube so might be worth checking back later.
  • When I close the game and go back to desktop, UE crash reporter says the game crashed even though it exited fine (weird)
  • No problems with hair, everything maxed out and hair seems to look superb
That's it for now, might have missed some stuff so will probs update again later as jumping back in :cool:


Edit*
6.5 hours played according to Steam :o
 
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Alright so modify your Engine.ini (C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\SilentHill2\Saved\Config\Windows) to add the following at the end

[SystemSettings]
r.NGX.DLSS.denoisermode=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.BilateralFilter=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenSpaceReconstruction=0
r.lumen.Reflections.Temporal=0
r.Shadow.Denoiser=0
r.FidelityFX.FI.Enabled=1
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0


Yellow = Enabled for Ray reconstruction if you have an RTX card
Orange = Enables FSR3 Frame gen
Purple = Disabled chromatic aberration
 
JoeBoi said:
Have you seen improvements from it?
Click to expand...

I tried out FSR FG and it only works when FSR3 is enabled so is not decoupled from FSR upscaling, makes sense since it's FSR3 not FSR3.1. The image quality is rubbish using FSR upscaling though even on Quality mode, too much RT artefacting.

DLSS Performance at 4K with ray reconstruction is very good.

Comparison, set video to loop for the best visual comparison:


If you use DLSS Balanced or Quality though then ray reconstruction is slightly cleaner still but the fps takes a bigger hit obviously.

Some people are saying it adds specular "sparkle", I've seen this to be the case if being used with another supersample method, but seems fine grain with DLSS. Not played enough with it on yet to determine if it's worth keeping on, perhaps there's a reason it's not on by default at launch...
 
ujalQ4r.jpeg


Look at this RTSS stat, the 4090 is at 80% utilisation, P core 07 is basically idle, and total CPU use is 17% meanwhile in other corridors earlier in the game it's 117fps with 97% GPU utilisation and all cores sharing the load..... Definitely CPU optimisation tomfoolery.
 
There is a ./ini file tweak to enable fog reflections too, but ghosting is always there even with no upscaling, this is what UE5 does under certain game conditions in games like this with grey colour tones under contrasty subjects. The ghosting is not related to DLSS or FSR etc, it is simply there at engine level and one of the flaws with UE5 so not under control of Bloober.

What is under their control is to optimised CPU/GPU utilisation, that requires a lot more time to nail and I now see why there as of yet still is no proper PC review and only PS5 reviews.

VincentHanna said:
Click to expand...

His finding is my finding too that I mentioned in my vig tech rundown, that HDR is good but because of the nature of a game like this, you can get just as good benefit in SDR as HDR as long as you understand what the two key sliders are doing to balance the black level wither HDR (HDR brightness) or SDR (gamma slider) since there's very little in the game in the way of specular highlights and artificial light sources to benefit showing off strong HDR with and there's always a cinematic black level raise by design and nature of what the game world is.
 
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Hmm maybe I have found another issue, whereby the game does not exit properly and Steam shows it's still running even though seemingly it exited fine a few hours ago, looking at Task Manager I just spotted:

2PAjUDe.png


Had ot manually stop the game from Steam
 
Now playing on controller, worth noting that by default it sets the controller layout to a Dual Sense so change to Type A or C depending on if you're using XBOX layout of Switch layout.

Have to say controller vibration is superb in this, even without dual sense the aptics are very reactive and strong and dynamic, even in the menu screens just navigating screens etc.

I also increased the aim and look sensitivity to 0.7 for both from the default 0.5. Made camera panning much more responsive (at least on a TMR stick controller anyway).
 
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Interestingly setting Shadows from High to Low increases fps by 15 for me, but there is visible artefacting by going to Low or Medium as a result, although shadow quality is only minimally reduced in accuracy:

Low:
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3s0ihIf.jpeg


High:
cM9OXiT.jpeg
FuOo07r.jpeg



Lumen artefacting on Shadows Low with Ray Reconstruction enabled in Engine.ini:
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Lumen artefacting on Shadows High with Ray Reconstruction enabled in Engine.ini
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Lumen artefacting on Shadows High or Low with Ray Reconstruction off (stock Engine.ini):
jjfJugZ.gif


From this it is clear that ray Reconstruction once again is transformative for visual fidelity and has no impact to framerate. if you have an RTX card then you absolutely should enable it in any game that supports it whether in settings or via Engine.ini line additions. Shadows being on medium or Low to gain fps does result in some speckling with RR enabled, but it's night and day better than the blobby mess Lumen artefacting that is typical with unreal Engine 5.

Other findings based on discussions above:
1: SSR on vs off makes zero difference to anything if Ray Tracing is enabled as RT reflections takes priority over it from what I can see.
2: Setting resolution scale to 200% makes zero visible difference and has no performance impact at all leading me to determine that this setting is completely broken and does nothing.
3: Ray tracing should be used as the GI and reflections especially are improved, better quality reflections and sharper reflections too.
 
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The frametimes can be somewhat or mostly controlled (other than a few traversal hitches) when locked to something decent, I set RTSS to 75fps for the game for example and with mouse ort controller it feels great:


There are some areas that run below this still like in Bluecreek later sections for unknown reasons (likely CPU optimisation as the GPU drops to below 80% use then too).

Mostly it's like the video though now which is neat, with the random area that just drops because why not :o

The animations and combat is genuinely superb, reminds me of The Last of Us in many ways which I also loved.

Take this bit slowed down by 50% for example:

 
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