While the Silent Hill 2 Remake has largely encountered the favor of critics and gamers so far, the PC port certainly has some issues that will be familiar to gamers, chiefly the stuttering.
Digital Foundry has uploaded an extensive rundown of the visuals in Silent Hill 2 Remake’s PC port, where they discussed both the visual enhancements and the downsides seen in the title. The biggest addition to the PC port is support for ray-tracing, which has significantly contributed to dynamic visual scaling, an element not available on Sony’s PlayStation 5. Hardware-based RT can be enabled through a single click, and with support for upscaling technologies like NVIDIA’s DLSS, there is surely a huge difference present.
While the visual enhancements are appreciated, the game’s frame rate suffers greatly in certain scenarios. Digital Foundry says that under cutscenes and while viewing “cloth objects,” the game drops down to 30 FPS, which makes the overall movement and experience quite buggy and unpleasant. Apart from this, the hardware implementation of Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen isn’t well-refined, and grass textures often appear to be flickering. The same goes for reflections too.
The most disappointing visual flaw is the in-game stuttering, which is associated with sudden FPS drops randomly while playing the game. However, as you probably know if you’ve followed Wccftech over the past couple of years, this is part of a wider problem associated with Unreal Engine; hence, we cannot completely associate this problem with the developers from Bloober Team. According to Digital Foundry, there’s no shader compilation stuttering; rather, there’s a traversal stutter due to the loading/unloading of objects appearing in the game, and this is rather an engine issue that Epic couldn’t even resolve in its own game (Fortnite).
Several other inconsistencies are also discussed in the video, smaller than those mentioned above but still noticeable. Some workarounds are present, such as user-made Silent Hill 2 remake mods, but they don’t cater to the more significant problems. We do expect the Bloober Team to come up with a solution, whether in the form of a dedicated update, or it might be that the stuttering problem may be addressed by Epic itself, but we will have to wait and see.
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