Silent Hill Townfall Crashing on PC – Fixes to Try
The game closes to desktop after a few minutes, sometimes with a Direct3D 12 error. These are the workarounds players report — none of them are official, and none are guaranteed.
Quick Answer
If Silent Hill: Townfall is closing to the desktop a few minutes into play, the reported workarounds are: turn off NVIDIA Reflex, turn off Ray Tracing, set display scaling to 100%, and — for crashes on launch rather than mid-game — turn off fullscreen optimisations for the game's executable.
All of them are community reports, not official fixes. Players report the crash across a wide range of hardware, including high-end NVIDIA and AMD cards, so it does not look limited to one tier of GPU. The developer has said a patch for PC performance issues is in progress, but has not named these crashes and has not dated it.
On This Page
What Players Report
The most common description is the game closing to the desktop after a few minutes of play, without a warning beforehand. Players describe a Direct3D 12 error in some reports, and an Unreal Engine crash window in others. It is not always the same trigger: some reports have it happen mid-exploration, others when an area is loading.
Players reporting the crash have listed a wide spread of cards, including recent high-end NVIDIA and AMD models. That spread is the useful detail here — it is reported across tiers rather than on one particular card, which is part of why a single setting is unlikely to be the whole answer.
A list of reports is not a list of broken cards
The hardware mentioned on this page is what players say they were using when the game crashed. It is not a compatibility list, and it does not mean those cards are unsupported or at fault. Plenty of players on the same cards report no crashes at all.
Reported Workarounds
Change one setting at a time and retest, so you know which change — if any — made the difference. Restart the game after each change rather than only editing the menu.
- Turn off NVIDIA Reflex. If your graphics settings expose it, switch it off, restart the game and play past the point where it usually crashes. This is one of the most frequently repeated suggestions in player threads.
- Turn off Ray Tracing. This one has more behind it than the others. A crash log posted by a player points directly at Direct3D 12 ray tracing, and several players on both NVIDIA and AMD cards say the crashes stopped once Ray Tracing was off. Others in the same threads report it crashed anyway with Ray Tracing off, so treat it as worth trying rather than as a cure. It is also the change that costs the most image quality, which is why it sits second rather than first.
- Set display scaling to 100%. In Windows, open Settings → System → Display and set Scale to 100% if it is currently higher. Some players report the crash stops at 100%. This changes the size of everything on your desktop, not just the game.
- Turn off fullscreen optimisations (launch crashes). If the game crashes immediately on launch instead of after a few minutes, find the game's executable in your Steam install folder, right-click it, choose Properties → Compatibility, and tick Disable fullscreen optimisations. This is the workaround players report for that specific case.
- Update your GPU driver. Ordinary troubleshooting rather than a reported cure for this game, but it is the right thing to check before reporting a crash.
- Verify the integrity of the game files. In Steam: right-click Silent Hill: Townfall, then Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files. One player traced repeated crashes to a missing file that this replaced. It takes a few minutes and rules the installation out.
Note down when it crashes
A crash after four minutes in the same area every time points at something different from a crash on launch. Writing down the timing and what you were doing makes the difference between a workaround that fits your case and one that does not.
If It Still Crashes
If none of the above changes anything, the useful next step is reporting it rather than continuing to change settings blind. When you report it, include your GPU model, your driver version, the Windows version, roughly how long the game runs before closing, and what you were doing at the time. A crash log or the exact error text is more useful than a description of it.
We have not found an official bug-report channel or a listed known issue for this crash, so we cannot point you at one. The game's own Steam discussions are where the reports we have seen are collected.
Does This Always Work?
No — and it is worth being blunt about that. These are things that have worked for some players, reported in the same threads where other players say the same change did nothing. The crash appears to have more than one cause, and no one has published a test showing which setting addresses which case.
- Reports differ between patches. Player posts are not versioned, so some of what is described above may come from an older build. If a patch has landed since September 25, 2026, treat this list as unverified for your build.
- None of these workarounds are official. There is no developer-documented fix behind any item in the list above.
- We have not tested them. GameHelpBase writes from published information and player reports, not from hands-on testing.
Official Status
Reported workarounds, and an official patch in progress
The developer has acknowledged PC problems in general but has not named this crash. On September 24, 2026 a notice headed “Upcoming Update Plans” said: “We are currently working on an update patch to address performance-related issues affecting the Steam version.” Whether that patch covers these crashes is not stated, and no date has been given.
So everything in the list above remains a player report, written up as a report. When the patch arrives this page will be rewritten around whatever it fixes rather than having a line appended to it.