Konami has just released Bloober Team’s official remake of the classic Silent Hill 2 on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 565.90, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.9.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Bloober Team has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Shaders, Effects and more. There are also settings for Colorblind and Motion Blur. Not only that but you can also enable 90s filter. Plus, the game supports Ray Tracing, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. You can find a separate article for these techs with comparisons and benchmarks here.
Silent Hill 2 Remake does not have any built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the starting area. This appears to be one of the most demanding areas in the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is mostly a GPU-bound title. Our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was used to its fullest, even at Native 1080p with Low Settings. In our benchmark scene, we were able to get around 200fps with the GPU being used to 98%. So, it was a bit pointless to benchmark different CPU configurations. In its current state, the game will rely heavily on your GPU, and most of you will be GPU-limited.
At 1080p/Epic Settings without Ray Tracing, you’ll need a GPU equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX 3080. From what we could see, Silent Hill 2 Remake favors NVIDIA’s hardware. That’s why the RTX 3080 manages to beat the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT in all resolutions. For some weird reason, the game was also constantly crashing to the desktop on our AMD Radeon RX Vega 64. I don’t know why, but the game ran fine on all the rest of the AMD GPUs.
At 1440p/Epic Settings without RT, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX was able to offer a smooth gaming experience. There were some minor drops below 60fps. However, if you own a FreeSync monitor, you won’t notice those drops. On the other hand, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 had no trouble at all pushing over 80fps at all times.
As for Native 4K/Epic Settings without RT, there is no GPU that can run the game with 60fps. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as Silent Hill 2 takes advantage of Lumen. As we’ve said numerous times, Lumen is a form of Ray Tracing. So, this performance at 4K is to be expected.
The good news is that Silent Hill 2 Remake can scale down on older GPUs via its in-game graphics settings. At Native 4K, we were able to get over 65fps at all times with the High preset on the RTX 4090. That’s a 30-40% performance increase. Then, by dropping the settings to Medium and Low, we got an additional 14% and 50% performance boost, respectively.
Graphics-wise, Silent Hill 2 Remake looks amazing. Bloober Team has done an amazing job recreating the environments in UE5. This is also one of the few games that use Hardware Lumen on PC. Thanks to Lumen, the environments look incredible. This is a graphical powerhouse, and a lot of PC gamers will use it to showcase what the PC can do. My only complaint is with the fog. In my opinion, it should have been more dense. I get why the devs implemented it that way. They obviously wanted all near objects to be easily visible. However, one of the key features of SH2 is its dense fog. So, I believe it should be a bit better and “heavier” than what we got.
Before closing, I should note that the in-engine cutscenes are locked at 30fps. I don’t know why the devs have locked them on PC. Due to that 30fps lock, the transition between the gameplay and the cut-scenes feels weird. The game also suffers from some traversal stutters. These stutters can be easily noticed in the city. They are not THAT deal breakers, though. At least in my opinion. Thankfully, the game doesn’t have any shader compilation stutters. The first time you launch it, the game will compile its shaders in the background. That’s why the main menu will be stuttery the first time you launch it. Once the game finishes compiling its shaders, the main menu will be fine.
All in all, the PC version of Silent Hill 2 Remake is above average. It’s not among the best PC versions we’ve seen. Still, it’s not a bad one either. It has a lot of PC features and settings to tweak. It can also run on a wide range of PCs. Yes, it’s quite demanding at Epic but you can get a great performance at High. Plus, it supports HDR, as well as all PC upscalers. Sadly, there is no support for NVIDIA Ray Reconstruction or Frame Generation. However, as we’ve reported, you can enable them via the Engine.ini file.
The biggest issue with Silent Hill 2 Remake on PC is its traversal stutters. So, let’s hope that the devs will do something to reduce them. To be honest, I don’t expect them to fully fix them. This will require a complete overhaul. So, at the very least, we can hope that they’ll try to at least reduce them. Oh, and let’s hope that they’ll add official support for DLSS 3 FG and NVIDIA RR via a post-launch update.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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