Konami has just released its latest Silent Hill game, Silent Hill: Townfall. Silent Hill: Townfall is developed by Annapurna and uses Unreal Engine 5. As such, I’ve decided to test it on my main PC system and share my initial impressions.
For these tests, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce 616.92 driver.
Let’s start with some good news. At Native 4K on Max Settings with Ray Tracing, Silent Hill: Townfall runs at over 60 FPS on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090. This is a pleasant surprise. After all, a lot of UE5 games struggle at Native 4K, even on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. But Silent Hill: Townfall hits 60 FPS, even with Hardware Lumen enabled.
This is also one of the best-looking UE5 games I have seen. The environments look amazing. The materials also look great. This game is a real showcase for Unreal Engine 5. So, kudos to the devs for making it look this good.
Sadly, Silent Hill: Townfall has some major stutters. To be more precise, it has shader compilation stutters. The game compiles a lot of its shaders while you play. This can cause big stutters on many PCs. On my AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, I had some very rough stutters. So, I can only imagine how bad this may be on a weaker CPU.
Here is a shot taken during the shader compilation stutters. You can clearly see that all of my CPU cores are fully used. The frametime graph is also very erratic.
I hope the devs add an option to compile ALL shaders the first time you launch the game. The game does have a shader step at launch. However, it does not compile all the shaders. I am not sure why they chose this method. In its current state, Silent Hill: Townfall feels rough due to these shader stutters.
Our PC Performance Analysis for Silent Hill: Townfall will go live later this week. In that article, I’ll benchmark numerous AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. So, stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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