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Silent Hill 2 Remake Optimization: Best Settings for PC

The best settings for the Silent Hill 2 Remake on PC!

The Silent Hill 2 remake is out, nearly 23 years after the original’s release. Developed by Bloober Studios on the Unreal Engine 5, the game features upgraded visuals with high-fidelity “Nanite” geometry, ray-traced reflections and global illumination, and a handful of upscaling tech to make it all playable. As is our way, we’ll test the performance of each graphics setting at every option coupled with image comparisons.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

  • Enable Resizable BAR.
  • Turn on Game Mode.
  • Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
  • Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
  • Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
  • Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
  • Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
  • Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Silent Hill 2: PC System Requirements

Silent Hill 2 has fairly hefty GPU specifications. Playing at 1080p “Medium” with 60 FPS requires a GeForce RTX 2080 or a Radeon RX 6800 XT. I reckon an RTX 3080/RTX 4070 would be needed for “High” and the RTX 4080 for ray-tracing. Luckily, the CPU requirements are modest, demanding a Core i7-8700K or a Ryzen 5 3600X alongside 16 GB of main memory, and 50 GB of SSD storage.

Silent Hill 2: PC System Requirements

Contents & Testing Methodology

  • The “Epic” graphics preset was chosen as the reference point at 4K in DLSS “Quality” mode.
  • Benchmarks at a glance:
    1. Resolution, ray-tracing, and quality presets.
    2. Upscaling and anti-aliasing.
    3. Shadow quality and texture quality.
    4. Shader quality and effects quality.
    5. SSAO, SSR & SSS quality.
    6. VRAM usage.
    7. CPU bottlenecks.
    8. Optimized settings for Silent Hill 2 Remake.
  • Hardware setup used:
    • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
    • Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
    • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
    • Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
    • Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: Resolution, Ray Tracing & Quality Presets

Silent Hill 2 scales well across resolutions. We recorded an average of 132.5 FPS at the “Epic” quality preset at 1080p, 97 FPS at 1440p, and 56 FPS at 4K native. This indicates a GPU-bound workload that is easier to optimize for.

Silent Hill 2 features ray-traced “specular” reflections and global illumination. They are enabled by a single toggle, which reduces performance by 20% on average. The framerates drop to 103 FPS at 1080p, 76.4 FPS at 1440p, and 45 FPS at 4K, mandating upscaling even on the beefy RTX 4090. The reflections look quite detailed (without any noise), while global illumination is mainly relevant in the interiors.

The game offers three quality presets, namely “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Epic.” The latter two perform about the same, while “Medium” and “Low” are ~15% and ~30% faster than the highest.

Upscaling & Anti-Aliasing

Silent Hill 2 features five upscaling algorithms: TSR, FSR 1, FSR 3, DLSS 3, and XeSS. DLSS is limited to GeForce RTX GPUs, while the rest should run on most GPUs. Unreal’s Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) features two presets, FSR 1 has three, DLSS and FSR 3 have four, and XeSS has five. DLSS performs (and looks) the best, at least on NVIDIA GPUs, edging past FSR 3.

TSR looks as good as DLSS and XeSS, retaining much more detail than FSR while being equally performant at the “Low” preset. The “Normal” quality is slower than its rivals’ “Quality” preset. TSR can add excessive sharpening, leading to artifacts.

Unreal Engine 5 Fixes/Improvements

AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation: Silent Hill 2 doesn’t include frame generation in the graphics menu. However, it can be enabled by tweaking the “Engine.ini” file in the saves (C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\SilentHill2\Saved\Config\Windows) directory:

  • Open the file using Notepad, and add “[SystemSettings]” at the end.
  • Below this, start a separate line and add “r.FidelityFX.FI.Enabled=1”

As noted below, FSR 3 produces the worst image quality, falling behind Epic’s in-house TSR upscaler. Therefore, if you’re concerned about texture detail and sharpness, avoid it altogether.

NVIDIA DLSS Ray-Reconstruction: Ray Reconstruction can be enabled by adding the following lines under the “System Settings” section:

  • 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.SceneColorFringeQuality=0

This produces clearer shadows, reducing noise, and ghosting using a neurally trained denoiser. It works on all RTX GPUs.

Update DLSS DLLs: You can update the DLSS upscaler to the latest version by downloading the latest nvngx_dlss.dll file from TPU. Paste (and replace) it under “SILENT HILL 2\SHProto\Plugins\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64” located in the Steam->steamapps->common directory. This should enable the latest version of NVIDIA DLSS, currently 3.7.20.

Enabling in-game anti-aliasing requires upscaling to be disabled. You can choose between FXAA and TXAA. The former costs nothing but doesn’t work well with complex geometry like hair, vegetation, and wiring. TXAA or temporal anti-aliasing produces slightly worse quality than upscaling, minus the performance uplift. In conclusion, stick to DLSS/FSR 3/TSR even if your framerates are high.

Shadows & Texture Quality

Like other Unreal Engine 5 games, Silent Hill 2 features soft shadows. At the “Medium” quality setting, they look nearly as good as “High” while costing just 4-6% FPS. Like global illumination, shadows are mostly visible indoors.

Thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s cutting-edge streaming capabilities, lowering texture quality subtly affects visual fidelity. The distant textures are reduced first, followed by nearby assets. Going from “Low” to “High” increases the VRAM usage by up to 600 MB or more.

Shader & Effects Quality

Shader quality controls the scene lighting (primarily indoors), brightening illuminated objects, and darkening occluded areas. The result is similar to ambient occlusion and global illumination. The performance hit is minimal.

Effects quality adjusts the detail of certain decals and weathering stains on walls, windows, and the ground. The performance impact is, once again, marginal.

SSAO, SSR & SSS

Lens flare, sharpening, and sub-surface scattering don’t noticeably affect performance, slightly improving visual fidelity. Separate Translucency is an optimization that pushes the calculation of translucency and related effects to a separate render pass. The performance and visual impact are negligible.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) can be enabled when ray-tracing is disabled. It adds depth to the scene by rendering self-casted shadows along edges, corners, and crevices. The performance hit is nominal, though the lows can drop by as much as 10%. Regardless, due to the impact on quality, leave it enabled.

Screen Space Reflections (SSR) have a minor impact on framerates and even less on visual quality. Most reflections in Silent Hill 2 are implemented cube maps and the like, leaving SSR for diffuse reflections that are hard to notice.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: CPU Bottlenecks

Like other UE5 games, Silent Hill 2 is completely GPU-bound at every setting (including upscaling), on mid-to-high-end PCs. We observed a peak GPU-Busy deviation of 6% when running the game at 4K “Epic” with ray-tracing and upscaling. Other times, it remains under 5%.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: VRAM Usage

Silent Hill 2 uses over 12 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Epic,” if available. Interestingly, toggling ray tracing doesn’t notably impact VRAM usage. Reducing graphics quality or enabling upscaling reduces the memory footprint to approximately 11 GB.

QHD or 1440p brings the VRAM usage down to ~10 GB, while 1080p consumes slightly over 9 GB at the highest quality preset.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: Performance Summary

The Silent Hill 2 Remake on PC has two graphics settings that tank performance most. These include ray-tracing and shadows which can be turned off/reduced for a massive FPS gain. The former grants a 24% performance uplift when disabled, while the latter improves framerates by 17% when reduced to the lowest. Screen space reflections can also be disabled for a healthy boost to the 1% lows.

Click here for high-resolution screenshots.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: Optimized Settings for PC

Optimized SettingsHigh-endMidrangeLow-end PC
Resolution4K (3840×2160)1440p (2560×1440)1080p (1920×1080)
Target FPS60 FPS+60 FPS+60 FPS+
Ray-TracingOnOnOff
VSyncOnOnOff
SupersamplingDLSS/FSR 3 BalancedTSR/DLSS/FSR 3 BalancedTSR Low
Anti-AliasingOffOffOff
Resolution Stability100%100%100%
Shadow QualityHighHighMedium
Texture QualityHighHighHigh
Shader QualityHighHighHigh
Effects QualityHighHighHigh
Separate TranslucencyOnOnOn
Lens FlaresHighHighHigh
Global Motion Blur***
SSAOOnOnOn
SSROnOnOn
SSS QualityHighHighHigh
Image Sharpening***
*Motion blur, Image Sharpening & Lens Flares are lefty to personal preference
CPUCore i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7700XCore i5-12600K/Ryzen 5 7600Core i5-12400
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
GPURTX 4080/RX 7900 XTXRTX 4070/RX 7800 XTRTX 3060/RTX 3060 Ti/RX 6600
Memory32GB (dual-channel)16GB (dual-channel)Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
High-endMidrangeLow-end PC

Silent Hill 2 Remake Settings for Low-end PC

Silent Hill 2 achieves a solid 60 FPS on our RTX 3060/RX 6600 setup (after some tweaking). Attaining the 60 FPS average at 1080p is relatively easy: Enable DLSS or FSR 3 “Balanced” and you’re set. However, you’ll notice FPS drops now and then. Ray-tracing needs to be disabled for better lows. This also gives you the extra headroom to scale up to the quality upscaling preset.

You don’t get the same choice at 1440p. Ray-tracing needs to be disabled, while shadows have to be scaled down to “Low.” Furthermore, the balanced upscaling preset is recommended for optimal performance.

RTX 3060RTX 4060RX 6600
Resolution1080p/1440p1080p/1440p1080p
Target FPS60 FPS60 FPS60 FPS
Ray-TracingOn/OffOn/OffOff
VSyncOffOffOff
SupersamplingDLSS BalancedDLSS BalancedTSR/FSR 3 Balanced
Anti-AliasingOffOffOff
Resolution Stability100%100%100%
Shadow QualityHigh/LowHigh/LowLow
Texture QualityHighHighHigh
Shader QualityHighHighHigh
Effects QualityHighHighHigh
Separate TranslucencyOnOnOn
Lens FlaresHighHighHigh
Global Motion Blur***
SSAOOnOnOn
SSROnOnOn
SSS QualityHighHighHigh
Image Sharpening***
*Motion blur, Image Sharpening & Lens Flares are lefty to personal preference
MotherboardCPUGPUMemory
GIGABYTE B450M DS3H WIFI ($84)AMD Ryzen 5 5600 ($116)NVIDIA RTX 3060 12 GB ($269)
AMD Radeon RX 6600 ($200)
NVIDIA RTX 4060 8 GB ($284)
8GB x2 D4 ($40)

Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset.
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