Silent Hill 2 Ultra Plus Fixes and Visual Improvements Mod v1.0.0-rc1

An all-in-one fix for stutters, particle trails, fog noise, and reflections with many visual improvements.

The Silent Hill games were some of my favourite games as a girl. I'm so excited to see them coming back, and made by Konami no less!

About Ultra+ Mods

All my Ultra+ mods have a simple goal—that as many people as possible can enjoy games—the way the artists and devs intended.

Ultra+ is not an Engine.ini mod. I often edit many game files to achieve the above goal. Have a look at the bottom of this mod for several other games I've worked on.

What it Does

• Copies some settings from Cinematic to the Epic quality so they're active in-game
• Reduced black point slightly to glue the game together to fix the raised black floor (you can still adjust the brightness in game)
• New Increases FPS by around 15%
• New Significantly improves ray traced lighting quality
• New Significantly improves ray traced reflections by removing the reflection roughness clamp
• New Significantly improves ray traced lighting quality
• Enables Virtual Shadow Maps (raster only)
• Now auto-enables FSR3 Frame Interpolation (FSR3 only). Note, FSR3 FI uses its own RHI implementation which is far more frame time stable than UE's RHI thread. Using FSR3 FI is one way to help stabilising frame times
• Fixes noisy ray traced reflections without requiring Ray Reconstruction, saving the roughly 10 FPS RR costs
• Disables Chroma64 DLL, which is only used for Razer hardware LED light synchronisation, but is known to cause stutters. Note I have disabled the UE plugin, so there's no need to replace the Chroma64 DLL
• Reduces hitching and frame time spikes due to volumetric fog. Fog is one of the main causes of frame time instability in this game, this is now greatly improved
• Sped up disk streaming by enabling DirectX 12 PSO disk cache
• Reduced hair pixelation by increasing MSAA
• Enabled separation between materials for subsurface scattering
• Enabled iris mapping (if supported)
• Enabled anisotropic filtering for virtual textures (it was completely disabled for this type of texture)
• Increased anisotropic filtering from 8 to 16
• Enabled light UE realtime texture sharpening by texture group (some needed more sharpening than others)
• Adjusted in-game graphics menu settings (Low, Mid, High, Epic) to better balance options
• Increased temp CPU memory from 50MB to 2048MB
• Corrected configuration errors in DLSS and TSR
• Updated Forced DLSS preset E which looks the best for the new reflections in v1.0.
• Enabled Ultra Quality Plus in XeSS upscaler
• Increased disk requests from 1MB to 4MB each (tuned for SSD)
• Fixed a hitch by disabling up to 15ms additional frame time for loading
• Fixed white flashes at edge of screen
• Enabled the prestreamer system for smoother streaming
• Fixed a hitch by disabling texture pre-tiling
• Updated Reduced virtual texture uploads per frame from 8 to 3 (expensive)
• Enabled downsampled occlusion queries (faster, no quality reduction)
• Added sphere bounding to frustum culls (faster, no quality reduction)
• Increased lens flare quality at Epic setting
• Increased bloom quality at Epic setting
• Disabled half resolution water refractions (they look awful)
• Disabled shader energy conservation which is for mobile platforms only
• Disabled some debugging which was still active in the shipped game (3 FPS gain on a laptop 4090)
• Fixed mip cache sizing (was '7', needs to be '14' for 4096x textures)
• Fixed some pop-ins by increasing LOD and shadow fade time from 0.25s to 2s
• Fixed a hitch by correcting shadow predraw resolution (it was enabled at full shadow resolution, so pointless)
• Disabled unbuilt shadows to prevent them being drawn in game (expensive)
• Fixed jittery fog noise by increasing fog temporal history weight
• Improved performance of fog by reducing Z resolution from 164 voxels to 112 (expensive, no visual difference)
• Fixed a hitch by limiting shader batch time from 16ms per frame (!) to 1.5ms
• Increased overall sharpening of the game from 0.25 to 0.7

How to Install
Use a mod manager, or drag SHProto to ...\SILENT HILL 2\

Performance

The performance is the same or slightly better using Ultra+ than vanilla. You should also notice the game plays a lot smoother.

I'd like to note there are currently several early mods for SH2 claiming better performance. However, this has been done by disabling visual features of the game.

There isn't actually a lot of performance to be gained over the vanilla game without disabling features. I have preferred instead to adjust the in-game graphics menu settings (Low, Med, High, Epic), and upscaling methods, so that you can adjust things how you please and performance and graphics scale smoothly.

Game Changes

Reflections
Comparison of Ultra+ v0.7 (no reflection denoiser), vs. Ultra+ v0.8 method, vs DLSS Ray Reconstruction imgsli.com/MzA1Nzcz

Shadows
Comparison of Ultra+ raster shadow changes: imgsli.com/MzA1MTQ5/1/0 (note, all the other Ultra+ visual improvements are enabled in both shots, the difference is Virtual Shadow Maps ON vs OFF)

XeSS
Changed to enable selection of the new Ultra Quality Plus mode

• Ultra Performance  => Performance
• Performance            => Balanced
• Balanced                  => Quality
• Quality                      => Ultra Quality
• Ultra Quality             => Ultra Quality Plus

TSR
High is changed to use TAAU plus temporal pass instead of TSR due to issues with particles (leaves etc.) leaving trails. It's a bit slower but looks great and doesn't have the visual issues. I've left the others as TSR for lower-spec PCs.

• Low         => 58% TSR screen resolution
• Medium  => 66.67% TSR screen resolution
• High        => 75% TAAU screen resolution