Silent Hill 2 Performance Overview

[Silent_Scone]

Over two decades ago, I found myself wandering through a damp, shadowy hotel hallway and into room 208. It feels like it happened just yesterday—clutching a bulky hands-free landline to my ear, rummaging through my inventory for the clock key, and asking my friend on the other end for guidance. As I opened the clock face, the whispers grew louder, more unsettling. For many, this was their first encounter with a truly unnerving suspense horror, and my 14-year-old self wasn’t prepared for the experience Kojima had crafted. I did what any sensible teenager would do - I shut off the console and told my friend, "Nope." Eventually, I did finish Silent Hill 2, but only when daylight poured in, and I had the comfort of family members nearby if I needed moral support.

Fast forward to 2024, and Bloober Team and Konami have resurrected this iconic classic, bringing it into the modern era with the power of the Unreal 5 engine. And let me tell you, it’s stunning. So stunning that this new level of visual fidelity comes at a price—even on the monstrous RTX 4090.

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Preset Performance

The performance differences between the presets are quite subtle, and even without ray tracing, the 4090 has difficulty exceeding 90 FPS when running at Epic fidelity settings.

HIGH PRESET / MEDIUM PRESET

LOW PRESET / MEDIUM PRESET

RAY TRACING OFF / RAY TRACING ON

Ray Tracing is employed to greatly enhance the game’s reflections and ambient occlusion. While the baked ambient occlusion is already impressive, RTAO takes it further, providing a more realistic interplay of light and shadow, especially in how it subtly reduces light where it naturally should, such as on the cushion in the left-hand corner.

With RTAO disabled, certain areas can appear excessively dark, an effect that's especially pronounced when using an OLED display, where the deep black levels can amplify the contrast even further.

For RTX 3080 & Radeon 7000 Series Users

SHADOW QUALITY MEDIUM / HIGH

SHADOW QUALITY MEDIUM / LOW

Lowering Shadow Quality results in minimal loss of image fidelity, with differences so subtle that they require close inspection to notice. Reducing this setting can provide a modest performance boost for users with NVIDIA 3000 series or AMD 7000 series GPUs or older.

Screen Space Reflections

SSR ON / OFF

Having screen space reflections enabled did not appear to benefit water reflections with Ray Tracing enabled. This can safely be disabled for a modest performance increase.

Upscaling Method

In some instances such as foliage, DLSS upscaler offers a more crisp experience. This isn't the first time that DLSS has surpassed native clarity. God Of War also has very impressive DLSS support. Due tot he fog, the upscaler does sometimes struggle to maintain this though as can be seen in the middle photo, where ghosting can be seen on tree branches. FSR 3.0, whilst still impressive, loses the most clarity here.

Bloober Team's reimagining of this horror classic is a brilliant revival of the series, perfectly capturing the haunting atmosphere of the original. I envy those who get to experience Silent Hill for the first time through this remake, as nothing else has quite matched its unsettling ambience to this day.