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SammiLucia

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sammilucia

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About this mod

An all-in-one fix for stutter, particle trails, fog noise, and reflections with visual improvements. 100% of donations go to Wildlife Society.

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Support and Supporting

Join The Ultra Place Discord For the fastest support and releases. See you there!! 😊


If you'd like to support our work you can say "thanks" in Posts, or support me on patreon.com/sammilucia 😊


About

An all-in-one fix for stutters, particle trails, fog noise, and reflections with many visual improvements.

I have read a few times this in posts that this mod reduces visual quality to achieve the 20-30% FPS improvement. Au contraire, all my mods increase quality. How can it increase FPS without losing quality? Games studios don't have time to do the last 20% engine tuning. It's like having a great car engine but not tuning it. This, is what I see as my job with the Ultra+ series of mods.

The Silent Hill games were some of my favourite games as a girl. I'm so excited to see them coming back, and made by Konami no less! 🫶 I will write my technical analysis later on.

Any feedback, good or bad, please let me know in Posts (if we can get Posts working 🤔... Please use the Forum for now 😊)


About Ultra+ Mods

All my Ultra+ mods have a simple goal—that as many people as possible can enjoy games—the way the artists and devs intended.

I do this by focusing on:

  • Improving visuals
  • Improving performance (yes, too!)
  • Fixing bugs

Ultra+ is not an Engine.ini mod. I often edit many game files to achieve the above goal. Have a look at the bottom of this mod for several other games I've worked on.


What it Does

  • Fixes animation hitches shown here: youtube.com/watch?v=B1Et12RgWlQ (fixed in v0.2)
  • Reduced black point slightly to glue the game together to fix the raised black floor (you can still adjust the brightness in game)
  • Updated Increases FPS by around 20-30% with no quality loss through several optimisations (these methods aren't used in Engine.ini mods)
  • Significantly improves ray traced lighting quality by enabling RTAO
  • New Reduced boiling noise in shadows and some areas (credit to soulicro)
  • New Fixes black polygons in the apartments
  • New Adds ability to toggle via function keys vignette, fog, depth of field, RTAO/GTAO, ray tracing, DLSS presets, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, FSR3 Frame Generation, UE frame time statistics, reflection quality
  • New Significantly improves ray traced reflections by removing the reflection roughness clamp (cyclable with F8)
  • New Fix screen tearing for some people even with VSync (vanilla bug) due to game being sync'd to the render thread instead of the RHI
  • Fixes particle trails for leaves and trash (may sometimes become re-enabled, goes away again if you restart the game)
  • Auto-enables FSR3 Frame Interpolation (FSR3 only, togglable with F3). Note, FSR3 FI uses its own RHI implementation which is more stable than UE's RHI (i.e. using FSR3 FI is one way to stabilise frame times)
  • Improves noisy ray traced reflections without requiring Ray Reconstruction, saving the 20% RR FPS costs
  • (Optional) Disables Chroma64 DLL, which is only used for Razer hardware LED light synchronisation, but is known to cause stutters. Note I have disabled the UE plugin, so there's no need to replace the Chroma64 DLL
  • Reduces hitching and frame time spikes due to volumetric fog. Fog is one of the main causes of frame time instability in this game, this is now greatly improved
  • Improves fog disocclusion black areas when turning around (it can't be completely fixed in UE)
  • Sped up disk streaming by enabling DirectX 12 PSO disk cache and increasing disk read size from 1MB to 4MB each (tuned for SSD)
  • Made faces more fleshy by increasing subsurface scattering for skin and enabling separation between materials (eyes and face)
  • Smoothed James' hair a bit and increased its quality
  • Enabled iris bump mapping for eyeballs (if supported)
  • Enabled anisotropic filtering for virtual textures (it was completely disabled for this type of texture)
  • Increased anisotropic filtering to 16
  • Enabled light UE realtime texture sharpening by texture group (some needed more sharpening than others)
  • Adjusted in-game graphics menu settings (Low, Mid, High, Epic) to better balance options
  • Increased temp CPU memory from 50MB to 2048MB
  • Replaced TSR Quality with TAAU, because TAAU looks much better in this game. High and Low are still TRS because it's faster
  • Corrected configuration errors in DLSS and TSR
  • Forced DLSS preset E which looks the best for the new reflections in v1.0.
  • Enabled XeSS Ultra Quality Plus which is available but was not used
  • Fixed a hitch by disabling up to 15ms additional frame time for asset loading
  • Fixed white flashes at edge of screen when turning around
  • Fixed a hitch by disabling texture pre-tiling
  • Improved texture streaming using various methods
  • Increased bloom quality
  • Disabled shader energy conservation which is for mobile platforms only
  • Disabled developer debugging which was still active in the shipped game for 4% FPS gain
  • Fixed mip cache memory sizing (was '7', needs to be '14' for 4096 textures)
  • Fixed occasional pop-ins by increasing LOD and shadow fade time from 0.25s to 1s
  • Fixed a hitch by correcting shadow predraw resolution (it was enabled at full shadow resolution, so pointless)
  • Disabled unbuilt shadows to prevent them being drawn in game (expensive)
  • Fixed jittery fog noise by increasing fog temporal history weight and tuning jitter upscaling
  • Fixed a hitch by limiting shader batch time from 16ms per frame (!) to 1.5ms
  • Increased overall sharpening of the game from 0.25 to 0.7


Community Comments

"Will report you to the Inquisition. This is witchery.
And thank you. Your mods are amazing."
— todosgiles
"A must have mod! hands down the best optimization for the game ever! thank you !"
— orochimay
"Just wanted to say that since the 2.0 versions my game is finally smooth without the incredible stuttering that I had !...I can even play with RT and a lot of visual glitches are removed !
— Doobidoot


How to Install

  • Delete old versions of the mod
  • Drag the main pak to SILENT HILL 2\SHProto\Content\Paks
  • (Optional) Download and copy the simple Engine.ini to %LocalAppData%\SilentHill2\Saved\Config\Windows\ and follow the instructions in that file to customise motion blur, black point, DLSS preset, and sharpening
  • (Optional) If you need much higher FPS, drag the Disable Nanite pak to SILENT HILL 2\SHProto\Content\Paks. Ultra+ is already higher FPS than vanilla, but I know some people need more FPS, so here it is. There's a quality reduction to some meshes (objects), but if you need the FPS it's worth it
  • (Optional) Install the Disable Chroma64 pak in the same location (unless you want Razer LED lighting sync). Helps prevent possible hitches caused by this DLL.
  • (Optional) Download the Ray Reconstruction DLL and put it in SHProto\Plugins\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64\ (next to the game exe no longer works since patch 1)
  • Smoother FPS—The smoothest way to run this game is:
          a. Go to your GPU Control Panel
          b. Enable Max Frame Rate
          c. Set it to the bottom of your normal FPS range — if you get 50–70 FPS, set it to 50 FPS
          d. Enable Motion Blur in-game. Ultra+ changes motion blur so to smooth FPS like a camera (you shouldn't notice it's
              (on, except it looks smoother)
  • Enjoy! 😊

Troubleshooting
Ultra+ fixes many engine config problems, and it's not uncommon with UE to see lower FPS or more stutters when it's first installed. Anecdotally around 15% of people see this, however it's very fixable. For all common problems, please see the first sticky post in Posts for how to fix it. (If those don't work, please post, I'm here to help.)


Function Keys

Press the function keys in-game to toggle or cycle through:

  • F1 = Ray tracing (note, RT status isn't reflected in the graphics menu)
  • F2 = DLSS Ray Reconstruction (requires SHProto\Plugins\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64\nvngx_dlssd.dll to be present — changed since patch1 it now must be in Plugins)
  • F3 = FSR3 Frame Gen (only works when FSR3 is enabled)
  • F4 = RTAO / GTAO (ray traced ambient occlusion / ground truth ambient occlusion)
  • F5 = Vignette
  • F6 = DLSS preset—cycles through A, C, E (game starts with E)
  • F7 = Fog
  • F8 = Fog depth of field
  • F9 = Reflection quality—cycles through high > ultra > vanilla > ...
  • F10 = UE frame time statistics
  • F11 = Saves settings to `SHProto\Binaries\Win64\UltraPlusConfig.ini`
  • F12 = Loads settings (not functional yet)

Uninstalling

Simply delete the pak.


Performance

The performance is the same or slightly better than vanilla. You should notice the game plays a lot smoother.

I can't test on all hardware in all game locations, however (I'm just one person) so I rely heavily on community feedback. If you have any problems, from potato to 4090, please do let me know in Posts or the Forum 😊. I do fix all issues and everyone is supported.

I'd like to note there are currently several early mods for SH2 claiming better performance. However, this has been done by disabling visual features of the game.

There isn't actually a lot of performance to be gained over the vanilla game without disabling features. I have instead adjusted the in-game graphics menu settings (Low, Med, High, Epic), and upscaling methods, so that you can adjust things how you please and performance and graphics scale smoothly.


Changes to the Vanilla Game

Reflections
Comparison of Ultra+ v0.7 (no reflection denoiser), vs. Ultra+ v0.8 method, vs DLSS Ray Reconstruction imgsli.com/MzA1Nzcz

Shadows
Comparison of Ultra+ raster shadow changes: imgsli.com/MzA1MTQ5/1/0 (note, all the other Ultra+ visual improvements are enabled in both shots, the difference is Virtual Shadow Maps ON vs. OFF in raster).

Note these improvements only apply if you're not playing with ray tracing. RT doesn't have missing shadows, so there's nothing to fix. Interestingly, the vanilla RT is not using ray traced shadows either. I can enable ray traced shadows, but they're quite broken in some areas, and offer no advantage. (Unreal Engine's raster shadows are really good.)

Ambient Occlusion
The vanilla game does not use ray traced ambient occlusion (RTAO) at all. It's using screen space AO (SSAO) no matter what mode you're in. UE has a much more accurate non-raytraced AO method called "ground truth AO".

Ultra+ changes this, so that non-RT now uses GTAO, with no performance loss, and RTAO when you're using ray tracing. RTAO is the most accurate of course, however GTAO is surprisingly close. Here's a comparison of all three modes: https://imgsli.com/MzEwMDU3.

Notice in SSAO, there is a shadow under James' collar which isn't there in GTAO or RTAO. We can see some other shadows are errors in SSAO. The main difference between GTAO and RTAO is that RTAO throws more light back into the scene, which is physically-based.

Motion Blur
In Ultra+ motion blur is changed from being a visual effect, to instead be used as it was originally intended, to smooth between frames, like a real camera does.

Computer generated frames are very precise and clear cut, whereas a camera captures directional (motion) blur. This is why 24 FPS at the cinema looks so much smoother than 24 FPS on a computer. Ultra+ changes UE's motion blur to work like camera motion blur, and improves its quality. You shouldn't notice when it's enabled, other than "oh, that looks smoother!"

XeSS
Changed to enable selection of the new Ultra Quality Plus mode

  • Ultra Performance  => Performance
  • Performance            => Balanced
  • Balanced                  => Quality
  • Quality                      => Ultra Quality
  • Ultra Quality             => Ultra Quality Plus
TSR
High is changed to use TAAU plus temporal pass instead of TSR due to issues with particles (leaves etc.) leaving trails. It's a bit slower but looks great and doesn't have the visual issues. I've left the others as TSR for lower-spec PCs.

  • Low         => 58% TSR screen resolution
  • Medium  => 66.67% TSR screen resolution
  • High        => 75% TAAU screen resolution

Compatibility

  • No, Ultra+ is not compatible with Engine.ini mods (except the Simple Engine.ini provided with this mod). The Engine.ini is the master override for settings, so if you use one with this mod, I can't guarantee anything will work

Recommended Mods


Contributors

Thank you to the HDR Den team for their help and telling me the game was released!

Other Ultra+ Games

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake)
Days Gone
Hogwarts Legacy
Robocop: Rogue City
Cyberpunk 2077
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order