Like a lot of Unreal Engine 5 games, Silent Hill 2 stutters and it stutters a lot. Why is it happening? Can it be fixed? Looking for answers on this, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole, with this game – and others based on Unreal Engine 5 – presenting issues even more concerning than big lurches on the frame-time graph. Shader compilation stutter? That’s not an issue in Silent Hill 2. Traversal stutter? Well, unfortunately that is – and it’s highly problematic. However, similar to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, there’s also animation stutter. Even if you manage to stabilise performance, it’s still impossible to enjoy a smooth, consistent experience in Silent Hill 2. We have some idea of why it’s happening and even a highly makeshift solution, but even so, UE5 continues to present issues that continue to pile up as game after game falls foul of them.
Before we go into more depth on that, let’s talk about Bloober Team’s work more holistically. There’s much to like and enjoy in terms of the PC version of Silent Hill 2. The graphics options are generally OK and there are some surprises too – like console-style dynamic resolution scaling support, even though it’s only limited to Epic’s TSR upscaler. Still, there’s actual scaling beyond the PlayStation 5 version of the game, which is something I don’t take for granted these days. For example, consoles tend to use software Lumen for diffuse global illumination and reflections, but the hardware-accelerated version is significantly better. Many PC ports don’t even bother to offer hardware Lumen, but Silent Hill does via its ‘ray tracing on/off’ option, most obviously producing far superior reflections and more accurate indirect lighting. This is generally a good thing as PC’s software Lumen implementation does not appear to offer the equivalent of UE5’s epic setting here.
I am excited that the game offers unique RT features only found on the PC version, and often I thought the game looked really great, but I did notice a number of visual flaws too that deserve to be pointed out should they be able to be fixed in future patches. For example, nearly all cloth in the game I have seen so far runs at 30fps, no matter your frame-rate target, so fluttering drapes or flags in the wind look awkward and pretty poor. It’s the same with cutscenes, which bafflingly lock to 30 fps using UE5’s frame-rate cap. This should never be a ‘feature’ on a PC port, but to add salt to the wound, inconsistent frame-pacing is the order of the day if you’re using v-sync. This impacts the PS5 version too in its performance mode as far as I can tell.
While hardware Lumen generally looks better, there are also bugs here. Grass can flicker, while the entire presentation can flicker momentarily when crossing consistent but seemingly arbitrary points in the game world. Lumen reflections also suffer from poor denoising presenting obvious ‘boiling’ effects, while moving leaves can ‘leave’ trails behind them. Other flaws and bugs present throughout, but it’s been remarkable to see the PC community attempt to solve the issue with mods. DLSS ray reconstruction has been ported into the game, for example, solving the Lumen denoising problem convincingly, while DLSS .dll swap-outs can sort out the trailing leaves. Even I got into the spirit of things with .ini tweaks to add ray-traced transparency reflections instead of just Lumen probes and screen-space reflections, which greatly improves glass rendering. As always, PC modders are making the best of the situation, trying to make the game better – and hopefully Bloober takes inspiration from this. There’s a lot of what we like to call ‘low-hanging fruit’ here: easy solutions that can demonstrably improve the game.