Silent Hill 2 remake’s PC system requirements are spooky, but namedrop DLSS

As a James who’s always forgetting things, I’m probably the main target audience of the Silent Hill 2 remake – one of yesterday’s many Silent Hill game and film announcements. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have expected such high demands from its PC system requirements, which have appeared on Steam.

Highlights include the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 – a former flagship! – listed among the minimum specs, alongside a 12GB RAM requirement, and Windows 11 as the recommended OS. Those with a GeForce RTX graphics card could get some performance help, though, as the requirements’ notes say that meeting the recommended spec will allow for 4K resolution “using DLSS or similar technology”. That’s not quite a formal confirmation of Nvidia DLSS support, but strongly indicates it, maybe along with similar upscaling systems like AMD FSR or Intel XeSS.

That said, any upscaler would need to do some extremely heavy lifting at 4K, as Silent Hill 2’s recommended specs are apparently only recommended for 1080p/60fps on Medium settings and just 1080p/30fps on High settings. The minimum specs, meanwhile, are apparently enough to scrape 1080p/30fps on Low or Medium quality. Developer/publisher performance estimates like these tend to err on the side of pessimism, but even so, for higher settings and resolutions you may need one of the best graphics cards.

Silent Hill 2 remake minimum system requirements

• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 / AMD Radeon RX 5700
• CPU: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
• RAM: 12GB
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Storage: 50GB available space
• DirectX: DX12

Silent Hill 2 remake recommended requirements

• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• RAM: 16GB
• OS: Windows 11 64-bit
• Storage: 50GB available space
• DirectX: DX12

Bloober Team, who are developing the remake, are no strangers to PC machine melters. Their most recent original game, 2021’s The Medium, included ray tracing effects that could bring low even an RTX 3080. There’s no reliable indication yet that Silent Hill 2 will also feature ray tracing effects, though if it did, that might explain why Bloober want an RTX 2080 just for 1080p.

Also, man, it’s just weird seeing the GTX 1080 given 'bare minimum' status. I remember buying one back in 2018 for about £550 and thinking it would be the most I’d ever spend on a PC component. Ha! Ha! Ha! I am desperately sad now.