SILENT HILL Townfall PC Performance Preview: Unreal Engine 5 Horror on a Fog-Shrouded Scottish Island
SILENT HILL Townfall brings Konami’s psychological horror series into new territory, both in setting and perspective. Developed by Screen Burn Interactive and co-published by Annapurna Interactive, this Unreal Engine 5-powered entry takes players to the remote Scottish island of St. Amelia in 1996, where thick fog, fractured memories, and unsettling signals hide something far more disturbing than an abandoned town.
The game follows Simon Ordell, a troubled outsider drawn back to St. Amelia to “put things right.” What that means is unclear at first, but as Simon explores the island, he begins piecing together memories he can barely trust. The town itself becomes a central part of the horror, shifting from lonely and atmospheric to hostile and deeply personal.
One of the biggest changes is the camera. SILENT HILL Townfall is the first full-length game in the series played entirely from a first-person perspective. That choice immediately changes the tone. Instead of observing a vulnerable character from a distance, players are placed directly inside Simon’s experience. Every dark hallway, flickering room, and fog-covered street feels closer and more uncomfortable.
Gameplay mixes exploration, story-driven puzzles, tense evasion, and limited combat. Simon is not heavily armed, and the game appears designed to make every tool feel important. One of the most interesting mechanics is the CRTV, a portable television that can tune into unstable signals. It is not just a creepy prop; it plays a role in exploration and puzzle solving, adding a distinct identity to Townfall’s take on psychological horror.
Visually, SILENT HILL Townfall makes strong use of Unreal Engine 5. The game uses Nanite virtualized geometry, Lumen global illumination and reflections, and Virtual Shadow Maps. Optional hardware-accelerated Lumen ray tracing is also available. These technologies help create dense environments, convincing indirect lighting, and heavy atmospheric fog that suits the Scottish island setting extremely well.
When the lighting, volumetric fog, detailed geometry, and shadow work come together, Townfall can look genuinely impressive. The town streets, interiors, and fog-filled outdoor areas benefit most from Unreal Engine 5’s strengths. The environment design appears to be the visual highlight, especially in scenes where light struggles through mist or bounces subtly across worn, abandoned surfaces.
That said, the presentation is not flawless. Character models are less convincing than the environments, and the overall image does not always reach the level of the strongest Unreal Engine 5 showcases. Still, for a slow-burn horror game built around mood and tension, the technology often serves the atmosphere well.
On PC, the experience is more complicated. SILENT HILL Townfall includes a shader compilation step when the shader cache is cold, complete with a progress screen. However, this initial process does not appear to compile everything the game needs. Additional shaders can still compile during gameplay, which may cause noticeable CPU spikes and frame time stutters.
That is especially unfortunate for a psychological horror game. Townfall depends heavily on immersion, silence, pacing, and dread. Sudden stutters during exploration can break the tension at exactly the wrong moment. These shader-related hitches are also joined by traversal stutters, a familiar issue in many Unreal Engine 5 games when moving through certain areas.
A more complete shader compilation process before gameplay begins would likely have helped the PC version feel smoother. As it stands, performance interruptions may be one of the main technical issues players notice, particularly during a first playthrough when shaders are still being encountered for the first time.
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency is another feature worth approaching carefully. Although the game includes Reflex support, enabling it reportedly caused severe stuttering during testing. Until that behavior is improved, the safer option is to leave Reflex disabled if you are trying to achieve the smoothest experience possible.
There are some welcome PC options. A Field of View slider is included, which is particularly important for a first-person horror game. Players sensitive to narrow camera views should appreciate the ability to adjust the perspective. The game also includes an optional cinematic letterbox mode, adding black bars to the top and bottom of the screen.
Interestingly, letterbox mode does more than change the look. Because it reduces the effective rendered area, it can also improve GPU performance. In one test scenario, performance increased from around 90 FPS with letterbox disabled to around 105 FPS with it enabled. That makes it a useful option for players who like the cinematic presentation and want a small frame rate boost.
HDR support is present, but it is fairly basic. There is no separate in-game HDR toggle. Instead, if HDR is enabled in Windows, the game activates it automatically. The implementation is functional, but it does not appear to dramatically transform the image. It behaves more like a standard Unreal Engine 5 HDR presentation than a standout feature.
There are also signs that the launch build could use extra polish. One issue encountered involved remapped keybindings sometimes failing to apply correctly. For PC players who rely on custom controls, this type of bug can be frustrating and should ideally be addressed in an update.
The official PC system requirements are somewhat unusual because both the minimum and recommended targets aim for 30 FPS rather than 60 FPS. The minimum specification targets 1080p at Low settings and 30 FPS. For that, the game lists an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7-8700K, paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super or AMD Radeon RX 6600, along with 16 GB of RAM.
The recommended specification targets 4K at High settings and 30 FPS using DLSS, FSR, or TSR in Balanced mode. For that experience, the listed hardware includes an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X or Intel Core i7-9700K, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, and 32 GB of RAM. The game also requires Windows 11, DirectX 12, and 75 GB of storage space.
For testing, a high-end PC configuration was used, featuring an Intel Core i7-14700K, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with 24 GB of VRAM, 32 GB of DDR5-7000 memory, a 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 25H2. Graphics comparisons were performed at 2560×1440 under GPU-limited conditions, with every relevant graphics option pushed to its highest available value.
It is worth noting that SILENT HILL Townfall does not appear to use traditional Low, Medium, High, and Ultra graphics presets in the usual way. When referring to a maximum or Ultra-equivalent setup, that means every individual graphics option was set to its highest value, including the ray tracing option for hardware Lumen.
For image reconstruction testing, Unreal Engine 5’s TSR Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling solution was used at native resolution, preventing upscaling from skewing the results. Motion blur was disabled during comparisons to keep the image cleaner and the measurements more consistent.
CPU performance was tested in a geometry-heavy town square area. To create a CPU-bound scenario, the game was run at 1920×1080 with DLSS Super Resolution set to Ultra Performance while graphics settings remained maxed out. This lowered the GPU load and made CPU behavior easier to observe.
The results were not as strong as expected for a relatively contained first-person horror game. On the Intel Core i7-14700K, the benchmark averaged 158.7 FPS, while the 1% low figure landed at 91.5 FPS. The average frame rate is high, but the gap between the average and lower percentile result suggests inconsistent frame pacing, likely influenced by shader compilation, traversal hitches, or other CPU-side spikes.
Overall, SILENT HILL Townfall is shaping up as an atmospheric and technically ambitious horror game with a distinct identity. Its first-person perspective, isolated Scottish setting, CRTV puzzle mechanic, and dense Unreal Engine 5 environments help separate it from earlier entries in the series. When the lighting and fog work together, the game can deliver exactly the kind of oppressive mood fans expect from SILENT HILL.
However, the PC version needs refinement. Shader compilation stutter, traversal hitching, Reflex-related issues, basic HDR handling, and occasional input remapping bugs all hold back what could otherwise be a more polished experience. Players with powerful hardware can still achieve strong frame rates, but smoothness may vary depending on scene, settings, and shader cache behavior.
For the best current experience, PC players should consider disabling NVIDIA Reflex if stuttering occurs, adjusting the Field of View to preference, experimenting with letterbox mode for a possible performance boost, and using temporal upscaling if targeting higher resolutions. SILENT HILL Townfall has the atmosphere, technology, and creative direction to stand out, but its PC performance will benefit greatly from post-launch updates focused on stability and frame pacing.SILENT HILL Townfall PC performance guide: best settings, upscaling, ray tracing, and optimization tips
SILENT HILL Townfall delivers a strong horror atmosphere, but its PC performance is not as smooth as it should be. While average frame rates can look acceptable at first glance, the lower percentile results tell a different story. The 1% lows and especially the 0.1% lows reveal noticeable frame pacing problems, which can make gameplay feel uneven even when the average FPS seems fine.
This inconsistency is made worse by unusually high CPU usage. For a game with a relatively focused scope, SILENT HILL Townfall can put more pressure on the processor than expected. Asynchronous shader compilation may push CPU load even higher during regular gameplay, which can lead to stutters or inconsistent frame times. Players using lower-core-count CPUs may experience even more difficulty maintaining a stable experience.
The good news is that the game can still be tuned for better performance. The bad news is that the graphics menu is more limited than expected for a modern PC release.
SILENT HILL Townfall graphics settings overview
The graphics menu in SILENT HILL Townfall is surprisingly basic. It includes only seven main graphics quality options, with very limited explanations. There are no preview images to show what each setting changes, and the game does not explain whether a setting affects CPU performance, GPU performance, or VRAM usage. There are also no built-in performance metrics, which makes fine-tuning more difficult than it should be.
Another issue is that many settings do not scale dramatically. In testing, several options produced only minor visual differences, small performance changes, or both. Lowering every setting to Low does not deliver a huge performance boost, and raising everything to Ultra does not completely transform the visuals either.
Because of this, the best approach is not to blindly use the lowest preset. Instead, players should target the few settings that actually improve performance while keeping the options that matter most for image quality.
Upscaling and anti-aliasing
SILENT HILL Townfall supports several upscaling options, including NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FSR Upscaling, Unreal Engine 5 TSR, and the older TAAU method. Intel XeSS is not available, and the game does not currently include native Frame Generation.
For GeForce RTX users, DLSS Super Resolution is the best choice. It offers the strongest image reconstruction and should be the first option to try.
For AMD Radeon users, FSR Upscaling is the recommended choice. Owners of newer Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series GPUs may also benefit from more recent FSR support through AMD’s driver-level upgrade path when available.
For other GPUs, TSR is the fallback option. TSR can still produce good results, but SILENT HILL Townfall does not expose TSR quality levels, which limits how much control players have over the final image.
When optimizing the game, start with Quality mode for your chosen upscaler whenever possible. Apply optimized graphics settings first, then lower the internal resolution only if your GPU still cannot reach your preferred frame rate.
Recommended upscaling option: DLSS Super Resolution for GeForce RTX GPUs, FSR Upscaling for Radeon GPUs, and TSR as the general fallback.
Frame Generation
SILENT HILL Townfall does not currently offer native Frame Generation. That is disappointing because the game is a GPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 title that could benefit greatly from smoother generated frames, especially at higher resolutions.
Third-party methods may be possible, but stability can be a concern. Because of that, players looking for a reliable experience should avoid relying on unofficial Frame Generation workarounds unless they are comfortable troubleshooting crashes, artifacts, or compatibility issues.
Fog Quality
Fog is a huge part of the SILENT HILL identity, so this setting sounds like it should be kept high. Surprisingly, Fog Quality can be lowered to Low while preserving most of the game’s atmosphere.
This is also one of the few graphics settings that provides a worthwhile GPU performance improvement. Higher settings add refinement, but the visual difference during normal gameplay is not significant enough to justify the extra cost.
Recommended setting: Low.
Texture Quality
Texture Quality controls surface detail and memory usage. At 1440p with TSR running at native resolution and Hardware Lumen enabled, Ultra texture quality stayed within roughly an 8 GB VRAM footprint during testing.
That means Ultra is a good option for most modern graphics cards with at least 8 GB of VRAM. Lowering Texture Quality does not produce a major visual change, but it also does not significantly reduce VRAM usage in many cases.
Unless you are dealing with clear VRAM-related hitching on a lower-memory GPU, there is little reason to reduce this setting.
Recommended setting: Ultra for GPUs with 8 GB of VRAM or more at 1440p.
Reflections
Reflections control the quality and resolution of reflective surfaces. High is the best balance between image quality and performance.
Dropping below High does not provide a meaningful extra performance gain, but it does make reflections look worse. Ultra, meanwhile, does not improve the image enough to justify the additional GPU cost.
Recommended setting: High.
Shadow Quality
Shadow Quality controls Unreal Engine 5’s Virtual Shadow Maps. This technology already delivers sharp and detailed shadows, and it scales fairly well compared with older shadow techniques.
Medium is the best choice for performance tuning. It keeps most of the visible shadow detail players will notice during gameplay while recovering enough GPU performance to make the reduction worthwhile. Going lower can make shadow definition noticeably weaker.
Recommended setting: Medium.
Global Illumination
Global Illumination affects indirect lighting and ambient shading through Lumen. This is one of the most important settings for SILENT HILL Townfall’s visual mood, because lighting plays a major role in the game’s horror atmosphere.
High is the best compromise. Lower settings do not provide enough additional performance to be worth the downgrade, while Ultra adds only subtle improvements for the extra GPU workload.
Recommended setting: High.
Post-processing
Post-processing controls visual effects such as bloom, vignette, film grain, chromatic aberration, and motion blur.
Lowering this setting can actually improve image clarity. At Low, several effects are reduced or disabled, including some that many players prefer to turn off manually, such as film grain and chromatic aberration. The result is a cleaner and sharper image, along with a small performance gain.
This is one of the easiest settings to lower without making the game look worse.
Recommended setting: Low.
Ray Tracing
The Ray Tracing option switches Lumen from software tracing to hardware-accelerated ray tracing for global illumination and reflections.
In SILENT HILL Townfall, Hardware Lumen improves reflection quality, and the measured performance cost is surprisingly modest on capable GPUs. Because the visual upgrade is noticeable and the penalty is not too heavy, ray tracing is worth keeping enabled if your graphics card handles it well.
If you are struggling to reach your target frame rate, especially on a GPU with weaker ray tracing performance, disabling it is a reasonable fallback.
Recommended setting: On for capable GPUs.
Best optimized settings for SILENT HILL Townfall
For the best balance between image quality and performance, use these optimized PC graphics settings:
Fog Quality: Low
Texture Quality: Ultra, if your GPU has 8 GB of VRAM or more
Reflections: High
Shadow Quality: Medium
Global Illumination: High
Post-processing: Low
Ray Tracing: On, if your GPU has strong ray tracing performance
The most important settings to reduce are Fog Quality and Shadow Quality. These provide some of the clearest performance benefits without damaging the overall presentation too much. Post-processing is also worth lowering because it can make the image cleaner while slightly improving performance.
Final thoughts
SILENT HILL Townfall has the ingredients for a visually atmospheric horror experience, but its PC version would benefit from better optimization, more detailed graphics options, and native Frame Generation support. The limited scalability of many settings makes performance tuning less flexible than expected, and the high CPU usage may create problems for players on older or lower-core processors.
Still, with the right configuration, players can improve frame rates while preserving the dark, fog-heavy atmosphere that defines the experience. Start with DLSS, FSR, or TSR depending on your GPU, use the optimized settings above, and only lower resolution scaling if you still need more performance.SILENT HILL Townfall PC Performance Guide: Best Optimized Settings for Higher FPS and Smoother Gameplay
SILENT HILL Townfall can look excellent on PC, especially when its lighting, fog, reflections, and atmospheric environments are working together. However, pushing every graphics option to its highest value is not always the smartest choice. Some settings add very little visual improvement while costing a noticeable amount of performance, and others may even make the image look worse depending on your preferences.
After testing the game at 2560×1440 on a high-end desktop system with an Intel Core i7-14700K and an RTX 4090, the optimized settings delivered a major performance uplift while keeping the game visually close to its maximum preset. The key is knowing which settings are worth keeping high and which ones can be lowered without hurting the overall experience.
Post-processing is one of the most important settings to adjust. Setting Post-processing to Low not only improves performance but also removes several unwanted cinematic effects that can make the image look softer or less clean. This is especially useful for players who dislike film grain, chromatic aberration, and other stylized filters.
Reflections and Global Illumination, however, are better left at High. Dropping them lower does not provide enough extra performance to justify the loss in visual quality. These settings contribute heavily to the atmosphere of SILENT HILL Townfall, so reducing them too aggressively can make the game feel flatter and less immersive.
Hardware Ray Tracing is also worth keeping enabled if your graphics card can handle it. The reflection improvements are noticeable, and the performance cost is surprisingly reasonable on capable hardware. If you still need more FPS, disabling Ray Tracing should be your first step before lowering other important graphics options. After that, using temporal upscaling is usually a better solution than cutting multiple settings down to Low.
Max Settings vs Optimized Settings
To measure the performance difference, the game was tested at 2560×1440 using TSR at native resolution. The optimized configuration was compared directly against fully maxed-out graphics settings.
The results were clear.
Max Graphics Settings:
Average FPS: 101
1% Low: 70
0.1% Low: 52
Optimized Graphics Settings:
Average FPS: 135
1% Low: 82
0.1% Low: 64
Performance Improvement:
Average FPS: +34%
1% Low: +17%
0.1% Low: +23%
The average frame rate increased from 101 FPS to 135 FPS, which is a 34% improvement. That is a significant gain, especially considering that the optimized settings still look very similar to the maximum preset during normal gameplay.
The improvement in frame consistency is also important. The 1% lows increased from 70 FPS to 82 FPS, while the 0.1% lows improved from 52 FPS to 64 FPS. These gains help reduce rough frame drops and make gameplay feel smoother, even if the game still has some technical issues.
This shows why simply selecting Ultra for every setting is not ideal in SILENT HILL Townfall. Some of the highest settings offer minimal visual benefits while reducing performance. A carefully optimized setup gives you a much better balance between image quality and smooth gameplay.
How to Improve SILENT HILL Townfall Performance and Image Quality
Remove Film Grain and Chromatic Aberration
Lowering Post-processing to Low already removes several visual filters, but players who want more control can disable film grain and chromatic aberration through the game’s Unreal Engine configuration file.
Go to this folder:
%LOCALAPPDATA%TownfallSavedConfigWindows
Create a file named Engine.ini if it does not already exist.
Add the following lines:
[SystemSettings]
r.FilmGrain=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
These commands turn off film grain and chromatic aberration without forcing you to lower the full Post-processing setting. After making the changes, set the Engine.ini file to read-only so the game does not overwrite it.
It is best to avoid adding large collections of random performance commands to the Engine.ini file unless you understand exactly what each setting does. Some community tweaks claim to fix shader stutter, traversal stutter, streaming issues, or CPU threading problems, but those results are harder to confirm. There is no single magic command that can completely fix engine-level shader compilation problems.
Disable NVIDIA Reflex if You Notice Stuttering
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency is usually a useful feature because it can reduce input latency. In SILENT HILL Townfall, however, it may cause frame time instability on some systems.
If the game feels uneven, choppy, or inconsistent despite showing a good average frame rate, Reflex should be one of the first settings you test. Try turning it off and checking whether the frame pacing improves.
Until the game receives a patch that improves this behavior, keeping Reflex disabled may provide a smoother experience for some players.
Avoid Clearing Your Shader Cache Without a Good Reason
SILENT HILL Townfall appears to continue compiling shaders during gameplay, even after its initial shader process. This means that clearing the shader cache too often can make stuttering worse, because the game and GPU driver may need to rebuild previously compiled shader data.
Let the first compilation process finish before playing. Avoid manually deleting shader caches unless you are troubleshooting a specific issue. In many cases, areas you revisit should run better because the needed shaders have already been cached.
Use Driver-Level Frame Interpolation if Needed
SILENT HILL Townfall does not currently include built-in frame generation. Some third-party solutions may be unstable, so driver-level options are currently the cleaner alternative for compatible hardware.
Owners of GeForce RTX 40 and RTX 50 graphics cards can try NVIDIA Smooth Motion. This driver-level feature inserts an AI-generated frame between normally rendered frames and can improve perceived smoothness in games that do not support native DLSS Frame Generation.
Radeon RX 6000 Series and newer GPU owners can use AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 through AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition. It supports DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL titles, making it a useful fallback when a game lacks native frame generation.
These options are not the same as native in-game frame generation, but they can help improve smoothness when configured properly.
Treat Community Frame Generation Mods as Experimental
There are already community attempts to enable FSR Frame Generation through Unreal Engine configuration edits. Some methods use FidelityFX-related variables rather than DLL injection, but reports from players are mixed. Some users say these tweaks work, while others see no effect.
Because stability can vary from system to system, modded frame generation should be treated as experimental for now. If you want a safer option, driver-level Smooth Motion or AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 is currently the better choice until the developers add proper native frame generation support.
Best SILENT HILL Townfall Optimization Advice
For the best balance of performance and visual quality, avoid blindly maxing out every graphics setting. Keep visually important features such as Reflections and Global Illumination at High, use Hardware Ray Tracing if your GPU can handle it, and lower Post-processing if you want a cleaner image and better performance.
If you need even more FPS, disable Ray Tracing first. Then consider using temporal upscaling instead of reducing the core visual settings too much.
Also, if you are experiencing stutter, check NVIDIA Reflex, avoid clearing shader caches unnecessarily, and give the game time to build shaders as you play.
Final Thoughts
SILENT HILL Townfall is a visually strong but technically inconsistent PC release. Its atmosphere, lighting, fog, and environmental detail can look impressive, and GPU performance can be quite good once the settings are optimized.
The bigger issue is smoothness. Shader compilation stutters, traversal hitches, high CPU activity, frame time problems, and a problematic Reflex implementation can make the game feel less fluid than the average FPS number suggests.
Fortunately, optimized settings can make a big difference. In testing, they improved average performance by 34%, increased 1% lows by 17%, and raised 0.1% lows by 23%, all while keeping the game visually close to max settings.
With the right configuration, SILENT HILL Townfall becomes a much smoother and more enjoyable PC experience. What it needs most now is a patch that improves shader compilation, fixes frame pacing issues, and adds proper frame generation support.
