Silent Hill 2 Remake’s PC performance isn’t a total horror show, but low-end rigs will shudder

The Silent Hill 2 remake is only out today, but it’s been nearly two years since the first system requirements appeared, immediately distressing our PCs so badly that they started having their own nightmares of fog-smothered towns and James Sunderland in an uncomfortably high-poly nurse outfit. Those requirements have since lowered and risen, and now we know for sure that nu-Silent Hill 2 is one tough customer for performance – albeit one that benefits greatly from just one or two key settings tweaks.

Among its arsenal of hardware-battering weapons include a seemingly non-negotiable requirement of 16GB of RAM – I tried playing on an 8GB MSI Thin GF63 laptop and it wouldn’t even launch – as well as our old friend from Unreal Engine 5, stuttering. In the opposing corner, there’s support for DLSS and FSR upscalers, and the simple fact that certain low quality settings don’t… look that bad? I’m sure someone with more skin in the Silent Hill game could better tell you how faithful this remake is to the original in spirit and mechanics, but on its own merits, there’s little denying that SH2R is a fine-looking horror romp. Like last year’s Dead Space, it makes good use of modern tech to set the mood, even if it’s more about the eerie and unsettling than the gory and gruesome.

Still, it could use some help on the framerate front. Here, we’ll take a look at how Silent Hill 2 runs of different tiers of PC hardware, before delving into the options menu to see which settings are best toned down.

Silent Hill 2 Remake’s PC performance isn’t a total horror show, but low-end rigs will shudder — Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Konami

Silent Hill 2 Remake system requirements and PC performance

First, a reminder of those updated minimum and recommended specs. The former no longer asks for a GeForce GTX 1080 – rejoice – but then only drops that to the GTX 1070 Ti. The AMD side of the minimum CPU requirement has actually risen, as has the system RAM demand: that’s crept up from 12GB to 16GB. The recommended list is largely unchanged, except that it no longer specifies Windows 11 as the operating system, so it won’t be a sticking point if you’ve held off “upgrading” from Windows 10. Not that it’s become an easygoing set of specs, mind – there’s still that worrying want of an RTX 2080, supposedly just for High settings at 1080p.

Silent Hill 2 Remake minimum PC specs

OS: Windows 10 x64
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 5700
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 50GB (SSD recommended)

Silent Hill 2 Remake recommended PC specs

OS: Windows 10 x64
CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 / AMD Radeon 6800 XT
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 50GB (SSD recommended)

If it helps, know that you can skirt just below some of these specs and still have a good time. I tried a GTX 1070 – admittedly because I, uh, don’t have a 1070 Ti – and at 1080p/Low, it averaged 47fps in one of the most demanding sections of Silent Hill I could stumble into. Even the Medium preset only dropped that to a more-than-playable 40fps.

However, that was with my test PC meeting the 16GB RAM requirement, while also packing an above-spec CPU in the Intel Core i5-11600K. Aim too low, and you can and will have problems. Obviously my 8GB laptop wasn’t up to the task, even with its up-to-date RTX 4050 GPU, and I couldn’t reliably stay above 30fps on the Steam Deck either. It does run the game, bless it, and some parts are decently smooth with Low settings and TSR upscaling, but no amount of settings-rejigging could save the Deck from big dips in the tougher areas.

In fairness, Silent Hill 2 isn’t the kind of game that twists your arm and punts your shin into accepting an upscaler. Running on the highest preset, Epic, at fully native 1080p, the RTX 4060 averaged 42fps and the RTX 3070 averaged 46fps. It’s only at 1440p and above where DLSS and FSR feel truly essential, allowing these mid-level cards to stick with both the higher rez and maximum quality. With DLSS on Quality mode, the RTX 4060 and RTX 3070 managed to keep at 40fps and 48fps respectively.

James fights a Lying Figure monster in the streets in the Silent Hill 2 remake. — Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Konami

As for higher-end kit, DLSS also boosted the RTX 4070 Ti to a slick 70fps at 1440p/Epic, as well as 50fps at 4K. This shows you don’t need the absolute best-in-class to get by, though for the record, the RTX 4090 produced 72fps on the same 4K settings.

A quality implementation of DLSS and FSR suggests that Silent Hill 2’s PC version was, in spite of its lofty requirements, no mere afterthought. As does the ultrawide monitor support, something that was missing – temporarily or otherwise – from certain other big-budget PC releases recently. Still, the fact that so many of these results don’t comfortably blow past the 60fps mark is a reminder that it’s geared pretty much specifically to more powerful, or at the very least newer, desktop rigs.

Not that having one is guaranteed to spare you from Silent Hill 2’s stuttering, which seems to happen increasingly often as you progress through its misty streets and mouldy flats. And the PC porting job isn’t flawless either: cutscenes are capped at 30fps, and FSR 3.0 is uncharacteristically limited in its hardware support. This might have helped get the Steam Deck over the line, but launch on the handheld and this option goes missing, leaving only the (drastically inferior) FSR 1.0.

I’m not saying that the feared performance nightmare has truly come to pass, but even if you’re used to blitzing games on a 100Hz-plus monitor, Silent Hill 2 will be a serious test for your hardware. Especially if you insist on sticking to the highest possible settings. Though on that note…

James nervously prepares to stick his hand in a mysterious hole in the wall the Silent Hill 2 remake. — Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Konami

Silent Hill 2 Remake best settings guide

I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good or bad thing that more and more games (including this one) are narrowing the quality gap of their highest and lowest settings. One the one hand, you can more happily lower certain options for the resultant speed boost, knowing that you’re not absolutely butchering the aesthetic – but then if a low setting remains deatil-rich, that boost could be little more than listless nudge.

Silent Hill 2 does have extra performance laying within its lower settings: compared to the Epic preset’s 42fps on the RTX 4060 at 1080p, dropping to Low shifted the average up to 58fps, which will look smoother to anyone with the most basic of trained eyes. Yet it’s also an oddity, in that very few of individual quality settings contribute to that.

Normally I’d run though all of these individual settings, benchmarking them one-by-one to see exactly how many frames they could wring from my test PC when lowered. In this case, however, I’d just end up writing “This did nothing” over a dozen times, which wouldn’t be fun for either of us. This time, then, let’s go backwards, starting with what I’d consider Silent Hill 2’s best settings and examining the hows and whys afterwards.

Supersampling: DLSS on Quality, or TSR on Low
Shadows quality: Medium
Shaders quality: Medium
Global motion blur: Off
Everything else: Epic preset equivalent

…Aaaaaaand that’s it. Honestly, the vast majority of the performance difference between presets seems to come down to shadows and shaders. When lowering the shadows setting, by itself, to Medium, my RTX 4060 jumped to averaging 46fps, whereas whacking shaders on Medium got me 48fps – barely shy of the entire Low preset. Pretty much everything else, from textures to effects to SSAO to reflections, either added no frames at all on their respective Low settings, or only added a piddling 1-2fps apiece. So why bother lowering those?

As usual, DLSS wins the upscaling quality competition, and is worth enabling even at 1080p. TSR, the engine’s built-in upscaler, is a reasonable-looking alternative for those without GeForce RTX graphics cards; FSR 3.0 is slightly faster, but doesn’t preserve fine details as well as TSR does, even with the latter on Low.

Lastly, a word about ray tracing, because Silent Hill has that too. As you can imagine, it eats up frames when they’re already at a premium: my RTX 4060 dropped from 42fps to 34fps with RT enabled at native 1080p. It’s also only a modest upgrade, the most noticeable change being the lack of a weird glow on glass panels:

Slotting ray tracing into those custom settings, the RTX 4060 could still pump out 54fps, which is okayish. But I’d rather enjoy the velvety 68fps that this GPU achieved without those luxury effects, a result that outpaces even the Low preset when running at native rez. And you don’t need a recent GPU to take advantage of these settings – the greying GTX 1070 shot up to 65fps, with TSR standing in for DLSS.