Silent Hill 2 Remake mod targets ray-tracing stutter

Modder bigbullet3 has released the 21 Sacraments Patch for Silent Hill 2 Remake, an experimental native modification that reworks how the game schedules its ray-tracing geometry builds rather than relying on Unreal Engine configuration tweaks. According to wccftech.com, the patch sets a soft budget of 50,000 primitives per frame through the r.RayTracing.Geometry.MaxBuiltPrimitivesPerFrame value, spreading queued ray-tracing geometry builds across frames.

Testing was carried out at 1440p on an Intel Core i7-14700K paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, with frame data captured in CapFrameX during a roughly 40-second traversal from the Martin Street save point to Woodside Apartments on Katz Street.

Average frame rate moved from 181.7 FPS to 184.6 FPS, a gain of 1.6%. The larger changes came in the low percentiles: 1% lows rose from 80.7 FPS to 103.2 FPS (+27.9%), while 0.1% lows climbed from 45.8 FPS to 69.8 FPS (+52.4%). Adaptive standard deviation fell 78.3%, from 59.8 to 13.0.

CapFrameX classified about 0.5% of the unmodded run, or 0.21 seconds, as stuttering, compared with 0.1% (0.03 seconds) with the mod installed — roughly an 86% reduction in the share of the benchmark spent stuttering.

Inspired by a Dead Space Remake mod

The project was inspired by Ishimura Patch, a community mod for Dead Space Remake that wccftech.com covered the previous day, with testing there showing a 176% improvement in 0.1% lows.

Silent Hill 2 Remake launched more than two years ago and its Unreal Engine 5 PC version has seen persistent traversal stutters since release.