The latest version of one of the best Silent Hill 2 mods available online brings significant performance improvements with a minimal visual downgrade.
The 2.3 version of the Essentials mod by Hybred brings a 31% performance increase with its Balanced preset with minimal downgrade to visuals. Other presets offer better visuals at worse performance and even massive performance boosts of up to 99% with massive changes to visuals, allowing a wide range of system configurations to run the game with acceptable performance. You can download the mod from Nexus Mods.
Unfortunately, no mod is currently capable of fully addressing the stuttering issues that plague the Silent Hill 2 remake on PC. As highlighted in a recent analysis, the game suffers from traversal stutters that are way too common in Unreal Engine 5 games and significantly impact the experience. It is a shame, considering how the Bloober Team exceeded all expectations with the game, as Chris highlighted in his review.
Silent Hill 2 is the best game Bloober Team has made. A faithful reimagining of the original, bringing it to the modern day without losing what made the original the best horror game ever, using modern game mechanics to improve where they could, and expanding on what was already an engrossing world. Without any shadow of a doubt, a resounding success, one that will likely come as a surprise to many.
Silent Hill 2 is now available on PC and PlayStation 5 worldwide.