Silent Hill 2 Remake has a new PC mod that cuts some of its worst stutters by over 50% in a benchmark. Called the 21 Sacraments Patch, the free experimental fix comes from modder bigbullet3 and aims to make the horror game run more smoothly when players move through its world.
Even high-end gaming PCs have had issues with sudden frame drops in the Unreal Engine 5 title. The problem tends to show up as players enter new areas, where the game can briefly hitch despite running at a high frame rate.
Rather than use standard graphics tweaks, the mod changes how the game handles ray-tracing geometry tasks. It sets a soft cap of 50,000 primitives per frame through the native setting `r.RayTracing.Geometry.MaxBuiltPrimitivesPerFrame`, helping spread some GPU work across more frames.
But the change has limits. It does not give the graphics card more VRAM, and some urgent or very large tasks can still go past that cap. Shader compilation hitches may also remain, as the patch targets a specific cause of poor frame pacing.
The idea came from Ishimura Patch, a similar project for Dead Space Remake. That mod tackles memory allocation in the Frostbite engine and delivered a 176% gain in 0.1% low FPS during separate tests. The two fixes use different methods.
For the Silent Hill test, an Intel Core i7-14700K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ran the game at 1440p. CapFrameX logged a roughly 40-second run from Martin Street toward Woodside Apartments on Katz Street, with the route picked to trigger frame hitches.
Average speed barely moved. The game went from 181.7 FPS without the fix to 184.6 FPS with it, a gain of just 1.6%. That was not where the most notable change appeared.
Instead, the 1% low FPS rose from 80.7 to 103.2, an increase of 27.9%. The harsher 0.1% low result climbed from 45.8 to 69.8 FPS, or 52.4% higher. Those numbers point to fewer severe slowdowns during the test.
Frame-time spikes also became less harsh. The worst ones came close to 25 milliseconds in the base game, but reached about 18 milliseconds with the patch. CapFrameX counted 0.21 seconds of stutter without the mod, against 0.03 seconds after it was added.
That works out to roughly 86% less time flagged as stuttering by the test software. Another measure, Adaptive STDDEV, fell from 59.8 FPS to 13.0 FPS, a drop of 78.3%. It tracks how much frame rates shift around their local average, rather than just raw speed.
Still, those gains came from one short route on one test PC. They do not prove the same results will appear in every area or on every system.
Version 0.5.2 remains a beta release for the Steam edition. Players can get it and install it by unpacking the archive and running `Install.cmd` while the game is closed.
Once active, the feature can be turned on or off with F8. Sound cues mark each change, and logs appear in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\SilentTraverseSH2`. The files `silenttraverse.ini` and `silenttraverse.log` can help confirm that the mod started.
The developer built and checked the patch using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, GeForce RTX 5090, and 64 GB RAM. Other PCs may behave differently, and the fix still leaves some frame spikes in place.
For PC players dealing with choppy movement in Silent Hill 2 Remake, the early numbers give this community patch a strong case for further testing. It is not a full cure, but the measured gains suggest it can ease one of the game's long-running performance issues.
Even high-end gaming PCs have had issues with sudden frame drops in the Unreal Engine 5 title. The problem tends to show up as players enter new areas, where the game can briefly hitch despite running at a high frame rate.
Rather than use standard graphics tweaks, the mod changes how the game handles ray-tracing geometry tasks. It sets a soft cap of 50,000 primitives per frame through the native setting `r.RayTracing.Geometry.MaxBuiltPrimitivesPerFrame`, helping spread some GPU work across more frames.
But the change has limits. It does not give the graphics card more VRAM, and some urgent or very large tasks can still go past that cap. Shader compilation hitches may also remain, as the patch targets a specific cause of poor frame pacing.
The idea came from Ishimura Patch, a similar project for Dead Space Remake. That mod tackles memory allocation in the Frostbite engine and delivered a 176% gain in 0.1% low FPS during separate tests. The two fixes use different methods.
For the Silent Hill test, an Intel Core i7-14700K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ran the game at 1440p. CapFrameX logged a roughly 40-second run from Martin Street toward Woodside Apartments on Katz Street, with the route picked to trigger frame hitches.
Average speed barely moved. The game went from 181.7 FPS without the fix to 184.6 FPS with it, a gain of just 1.6%. That was not where the most notable change appeared.
Instead, the 1% low FPS rose from 80.7 to 103.2, an increase of 27.9%. The harsher 0.1% low result climbed from 45.8 to 69.8 FPS, or 52.4% higher. Those numbers point to fewer severe slowdowns during the test.
Frame-time spikes also became less harsh. The worst ones came close to 25 milliseconds in the base game, but reached about 18 milliseconds with the patch. CapFrameX counted 0.21 seconds of stutter without the mod, against 0.03 seconds after it was added.
That works out to roughly 86% less time flagged as stuttering by the test software. Another measure, Adaptive STDDEV, fell from 59.8 FPS to 13.0 FPS, a drop of 78.3%. It tracks how much frame rates shift around their local average, rather than just raw speed.
Still, those gains came from one short route on one test PC. They do not prove the same results will appear in every area or on every system.
Version 0.5.2 remains a beta release for the Steam edition. Players can get it and install it by unpacking the archive and running `Install.cmd` while the game is closed.
Once active, the feature can be turned on or off with F8. Sound cues mark each change, and logs appear in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\SilentTraverseSH2`. The files `silenttraverse.ini` and `silenttraverse.log` can help confirm that the mod started.
The developer built and checked the patch using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, GeForce RTX 5090, and 64 GB RAM. Other PCs may behave differently, and the fix still leaves some frame spikes in place.
For PC players dealing with choppy movement in Silent Hill 2 Remake, the early numbers give this community patch a strong case for further testing. It is not a full cure, but the measured gains suggest it can ease one of the game's long-running performance issues.
