The Silent Hill 2 remake has a Steam page, and some steep system requirements

Konami announced the long-rumoured Silent Hill 2 remake is real, and is being developed by Bloober Team, the Polish studio responsible for The Medium. Said remake now has a Steam page, and a set of system requirements. They are… not low.

The recommended specs call for a GeForce RTX 2080 or AMD Radeon 6800XT while noting they will enable you to play on medium-quality settings at 60fps, or on high-quality settings at a mere 30fps either in Full HD "or 4k using DLSS or similar technology". That's a heck of a demand to still end up with just 30fps on high after turning on DLSS.

Bloober are certainly capable of making attractive games, and The Medium's spooky split worlds and character animations looked great. Though I did have to turn ray tracing off even with a 3080 to stop the framerate from dropping whenever someone lit a cigarette.

The original Silent Hill used fog to cover up its limited draw-distance. These days, volumetric fog can be a demanding feature, affecting performance in games like Monster Hunter: World and Vermintide 2 (where turning it down can net you a 15% framerate boost, you're welcome). But it's possible that other things are responsible for the high specs, and we don't know how far along in development Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake is. The system requirements may be an educated guess that will be revised closer to release, and Silent Hill 2 doesn't have a release date yet. 

Just yesterday the Gotham Knights system requirements came in, and they too were surprisingly demanding. Silent Hill 2's description says we'll "Experience a master-class in psychological survival horror―lauded as the best in the series―on the latest hardware with chilling visuals and visceral sounds" and maybe they mean it about "the latest hardware".

Here are the full Silent Hill 2 system requirements.

Minimum

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 x64
  • Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 | AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
  • Memory: 12 GB RAM
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Storage: 50 GB available space
  • Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device.
  • Additional Notes: Playing on minimum requirements should enable to play on Low/Medium quality settings in FullHD (1080p) in stable 30 FPS.
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 11 x64
  • Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K | AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 2080RTX or AMD Radeon 6800XT
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Storage: 50 GB available space
  • Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device.
  • Additional Notes: Playing on recommended requirements should enable to play on Medium quality settings in 60 FPS or High quality settings in 30 FPS, in FullHD (or 4k using DLSS or similar technology).
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.