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Everything you need to know about the crashing error on PC in Silent Hill F, including the possible reasons and fixes.
Silent Hill F is easily one of the best showcases of Unreal Engine 5 on PC. Unlike most UE5 games, Silent Hill F doesn’t exhibit any form of shader compilation stutters, which helps elevate the game’s immersion factor. Furthermore, the also scales incredibly well across most PC configurations, albeit within Konami’s specified system specifications. Suffice it to say, Silent Hill F is a pretty good PC port, despite being an UE5 game. That said, it’s not without its faults, with some players reporting crashing issues on start up.
While the game is well-optimized for the most part, it tends to crash quite frequently, especially on lower-end GPUs. However, there are a few fixes you can try to fix the crashing issues in the game. Here’s a comprehensive guide on Silent Hill F’s crashing errors on PC, and the possible fixes to try.
Also Read: Silent Hill F Review: Beauty in Horror
Possible Fixes for Silent Hill F Crashing Error on PC
The primary reason for the crashes seems to be related to VRAM. Although Silent Hill F isn’t particularly heavy on the GPU, it does require a baseline of 6 GB of VRAM to work without issues. As such, if you try to run the game on a GPU with less than 6 GB of VRAM, you will face crashes. This is especially true on laptop GPUs, where VRAM is often shared by the CPU, which further limits the available memory for games. We tested out the game on an RTX 3060 (4 GB) laptop, and it wasn’t even able to boot the game up.
With some tweaks to the game’s .ini file, we were able to get the game running on the laptop 3060. However, the performance wasn’t even close to being playable. As such, we highly recommend against buying Silent Hill F if you have a GPU with less than 6 GB of VRAM. As for the crashes on 6 GB and higher GPUs, it also seems to stem from VRAM usage.
The settings that impacts VRAM usage the most are Texture Quality, Shader Quality, and surprisingly enough, View Distance Quality. Silent Hill F uses both Virtual Shadow Maps (VSMs) and Lumen, which explains the higher VRAM usage. At 1080p and High settings, the game tends to hover around 7.2 GB of VRAM usage. Bumping down the settings to Medium reduces VRAM usage by 25-30%. As such, tweaking the graphics settings is a great way of stabilizing the game.
Also Read: Silent Hill F: All Difficulty Settings, Explained
That said, here are all the possible fixes to try for Silent Hill F’s crashing errors on PC:
Reduce Settings and VRAM Usage
On GPUs with 6 GB of VRAM, you want to keep majority of the settings at Low. You can refer to our PC optimization guide for Silent Hill F to get a better idea of which settings to reduce. In addition to settings tweaks, we also highly recommend using either FSR or DLSS. If you have a Nvidia RTX 30 series and above GPU, we recommend using DLSS at Quality or Balanced mode. At 1080p, you don’t want to use DLSS Performance as it will degrade the image quality with very little performance gain.
Furthermore, if you’re using an AMD GPU, use FSR instead of XeSS, as it offers better performance to visuals ratio. Additionally, we also highly recommend limiting the game’s frame rate at the driver level. Limiting the frame rate not only minimizes chances of crashes, but also keep your CPU usage (and temperatures) in check.
Perform a Clean GPU Driver Install
This is the fix that helped us run the game after facing crashes on an RTX 4070 PC. Although Silent Hill F has a dedicated shader compilation process, it’s not nearly as reliable as other UE5 games. As such, reinstalling your GPU drivers allows you to rebuild the game’s shaders from scratch. Furthermore, performing a clean install, either using Nvidia App or AMD Adrenaline or DDU makes sure the drivers are installed without any issues. To be on the safer side, we also recommend verifying the game files on Steam.
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