Silent Hill 2 PC

[mrk]

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.

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:

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


Edit*
6.5 hours played according to Steam

 

[VincentHanna]

I can't enable HDR on mine

Windows HDR is off for Display 1, on for display 2 (which I am using)

Hadn't been an issue in other UE5 titles.

 

[jklc]

This one landed a bit wonky. Sounds playable but I think I'll come back to this one a patch or two later.

 

[Nitefly]

I can't enable HDR on mine

Windows HDR is off for Display 1, on for display 2 (which I am using)

Hadn't been an issue in other UE5 titles.

Try turning off one of the displays… exit the game, disable / re-enable HDR, try again.

I’m now back on the HDR myself (after recalibrating HDR in windows *groan*) I do think the ability to set all the brightness and luminance settings is pretty great. Theres three main things to play with:

HDR low luminescence - I lowered this slightly
HDR mid luminescence - I increased this slightly
HDR brightness - I increased slightly

Despite having an OLED I think it’s important to keep some minimum luminescence. If a corridor is pretty much pitch black, but there’s lots of detail you’re missing - it’s too dark.

With that said, you do get a flash light later in the game so perhaps wait until you get that before spending hours on the settings! I don’t consider that a spoiler - you get it at the point you need it - just trying to save you time

 

[mrk]

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]

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

Have you seen improvements from it?

 

[mrk]

Have you seen improvements from it?

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...

 

[mrk]

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.

 

[Firegod]

Been trying out a few things from an AMD GPU perspective. For me, I've gone with no FSR upscaling. Don't like what it does to the image. On Medium settings (no motion blur) with RT at 1440p I'm seeing about 50fps. I decided as it isn't a fast paced shooter to give AFMF2 a go via Adrenaline software. My first time trying it (even though I read an online article saying Frame Gen isn't supported?) I set it to High search mode (as I'm using 1440p) and Quality mode (as using a dGPU). With Chill set to peak 80fps and idle 75fps which AFMF2 equates to about 160fps and 150fps respectively (so just under my monitor 165 max rate). VSync off but Enhanced sync is enabled. So far it seems totally fine just wandering around and stuff. FPS has gone up into the 100's. Frame Gen Lag was 13ms. GPU temp was around 60ºC with power usage, using my undervolt, at 190w.

The only thing that is bugging me is with the TXAA anti-aliasing. When you pan around your character the ghosting is annoying. Change to FXAA or None, and it goes away, but the image quality is degraded.

 

[Firegod]

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

Disabled the chromatic aberration as well, ta.

 

[TNA]

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.

80% utilisation to draw the image above? Lol

 

[Parky]

There's definitely a lot of performance to be had messing around with FSR3 and frame generation, I can get pretty much double the fps with ray tracing on compared to DLSS when walking around the streets, the quality is obviously just a bit poorer, both exhibit ghosting for me.

The fog looks fantastic but the one thing I've noticed messing around with settings and now can't unsee is that the reflections in the street puddles aren't correct even with RT, it looks like it's missing the fog layer?

 

[markoboyo11]

So I pre ordered the digital deluxe but I can't download this. Restarted steam and then PC but nothing.

Any advice? Seems to be wide spread......just my luck.

 

[VincentHanna]

Try turning off one of the displays… exit the game, disable / re-enable HDR, try again.

I’m now back on the HDR myself (after recalibrating HDR in windows *groan*) I do think the ability to set all the brightness and luminance settings is pretty great. Theres three main things to play with:

HDR low luminescence - I lowered this slightly
HDR mid luminescence - I increased this slightly
HDR brightness - I increased slightly

Despite having an OLED I think it’s important to keep some minimum luminescence. If a corridor is pretty much pitch black, but there’s lots of detail you’re missing - it’s too dark.

With that said, you do get a flash light later in the game so perhaps wait until you get that before spending hours on the settings! I don’t consider that a spoiler - you get it at the point you need it - just trying to save you time

 

[mrk]

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.

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.

 

[mrk]

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:

Had ot manually stop the game from Steam

 

[markoboyo11]

Looks like I'm waiting till the 8th even tho I had the deluxe edition pre ordered, seems to be a lot of people in the same boat.
Shame I was really looking forward to it tonight.

Anyway enjoy guys.

 

[AWPC]

Having a great time so far!

Graphics look astounding to me! So much detail, small attention to detail, environmental debris add so much atmosphere to the game. Shiny reflections look really good the rusting cars especially the attention to detail is amazing so much effort went into those.
Soundtrack is also stunning. Great original & remixed music. Intense sound effects to really make you fear what is coming next!

I love how Bloober Team + Konami also added so many new little touches & expanded naturally previous locked off areas.

Only using a lowly ancient circa 2016 GTX1080 right now but finding 4K (without HDR) performance with max details is fine for me @ 30FPS! Traversal hitching is there at times but overall the FPS are very smooth for me which is insane on such an old GPU!

Have to swap my RTX2060 Super into the gaming rig to see how much better it looks with RT + DLSS (that GPU is noisy though never liked it much just cba to spend the required £££ for a decent upgrade anymore!).

If you liked the original SH2 this is a no brainer to buy ASAP hours melt away just exploring reading the town lore admiring the scenery (fog, water, leaves, debris all combine with the haunting soundtrack to make this an excellent unmissable experience!). So very easy to lose a few hours & not even notice which is a great sign of how well made this is on PC!!

 

[Kelt]

Tested and working!

Silent Hill 2 Cutscene Improvements:

The solutions remove the black bars from the cutscenes in anything other than 16:9 and fully unlock the FPS from 30.

Release Silent Hill 2 (2024) improvements · RoseTheFlower/UltrawideIndex

The solutions remove the black bars in anything other than 16:9 and fully unlock the FPS from 30. Instructions: Download the latest version of the preferred archive(s) below. Unpack to \SHProto\Bi...

github.com

 

[TNA]

Thanks for all the beta teating lads. Should be in tip top shape by Christmas sales