Play Silent Hill: Downpour natively on Windows, in 1080p at 60 FPS, with keyboard + mouse — no emulator required.
Important
v1.1.8 (hotfix, 2026-09-03) — v1.1.7 refused to start on Windows 10 / older Windows 11 with Failed to get an adapter supporting Direct3D 12 (issue #29): the executable demanded a DirectX Agility runtime that was not in the package. v1.1.8 is v1.1.7 with that dependency removed — it uses the system Direct3D 12 runtime again, exactly like v1.1.6. Nothing else changed; if v1.1.7 already runs for you, updating changes nothing visible.
Note
v1.1.7 is out — and it is deliberately not a "final" anything. It's a compilation of every update that has been accumulating on the dev machine since v1.1.6, shipped as one package before something bigger that is already in the works.
Highlights: a first-run disc-image installer (community contribution by Alexbeav — point it at your own ISO and it extracts everything itself), no more AVX2 requirement (pre-2013 CPUs boot the game now), mouse look rebuilt on raw input with direct displacement mapping, nine correctness fixes ported from upstream ReXGlue v0.10, audio mix fixes (bass is back in stereo mixes; one-shot SFX no longer crunch), and achievements with unlock toasts — press F7 in-game to see your list. Full notes below.
Already on v1.1.x? Launch PlayDownpour.exe and click the pill banner — v1.1.7 installs in place; your saves, settings, and warm shader cache are preserved (and backed up to %TEMP% first, automatically).
Older release notes live in docs/CHANGELOG.md.
Tip
v1.1.7 rebuilt mouse look from scratch on raw input with direct displacement mapping. With "Use Raw Input" ON (the default), the pipeline is now just:
deflection = deadzone_floor + |raw HID delta| × Raw Input Scale × Stick Scale
Motion this frame = camera turn this frame. Hand stops = camera stops, instantly. No smoothing filter, no decay tail, no ramp — those knobs now apply only to the WM_MOUSEMOVE fallback path (Use Raw Input off, Wine/VM/RDP setups).
| Field | Raw path (default) | Fallback path |
|---|---|---|
| Use Raw Input | ON — unaccelerated HID counts via WM_INPUT |
OFF — Windows pointer ballistics |
| Raw Input Scale | ✅ main speed knob (default 0.6) |
— |
| Stick Scale | ✅ second speed knob (default 800) |
— |
| Deadzone Compensation | ✅ floor for the first count of motion (default 4000, hard-floored at the game's own stick deadzone) |
✅ ramp target |
| Invert Mouse Y | ✅ | ✅ |
| Mouse Sensitivity / Smoothing / Acceleration Curve / Stick Decay | — ignored | ✅ full legacy pipeline |
Tuning: too slow/fast overall → Raw Input Scale (0.3 deliberate ↔ 1.5 twitchy at 1600 DPI; halve for 3200 DPI, double for 800 DPI). Small motions feel dead → raise Deadzone Compensation toward 9000. Flicks saturate too easily → lower Stick Scale.
The honest ceiling: the game reads a controller stick, and a fully-deflected stick is the fastest turn its input model allows. Mouse now reaches that ceiling instantly, but can't exceed it — raising it needs a camera-speed patch in the game code (on the roadmap).
This is not a "final" release. v1.1.7 is a compilation of everything that has been accumulating on the dev machine since v1.1.6 — shipped as one package before something bigger that is already in progress.
A fresh install no longer requires you to pre-extract your game dump by hand. If the game data is missing on first launch, a new wizard asks for your own Silent Hill: Downpour ISO (Redump, XGD3, or raw dump layouts are auto-detected), extracts the game partition itself, then chains into the existing Title Update installer — which can also fetch TU1 automatically. Extraction is resumable: interrupt it, relaunch, and it continues where it stopped. Headless installs are covered by DOWNPOUR_INSTALL_ISO / DOWNPOUR_INSTALL_TU environment variables.
Contributed by Alexbeav (PR #27) — the first external code contribution to the project. Thank you!
The runtime was shipping with -march=x86-64-v3, which hard-requires AVX2 — CPUs older than Intel Haswell (2013) / AMD Excavator (2015) died with 0xc0000142 before the first log line. The build now targets baseline x86-64 + SSSE3 with proper Snappy feature-detection overrides. FX-8300-class machines boot the game.
The raw-input mouse path was reimplemented from scratch in the runtime (WM_INPUT, no Windows pointer ballistics), and — after live testing — the whole stick-emulation filter chain was taken out of the raw path: no EMA smoothing (lag), no decay tail (camera drift after the hand stops), no ramp remap (which silently discarded small motions below the game's stick deadzone — the "mouse feels dead and slow" reports were this). Motion now maps directly: any movement instantly clears the deadzone floor; stopping stops the camera the same frame. Cursor capture also moved off the guest input-poll thread onto the UI thread, removing a poll-stall source. The legacy WM_MOUSEMOVE pipeline remains as the fallback (Use Raw Input off / Wine / VMs). See the mouse tuning guide.
Hand-ported (the fork can't rebase — upstream rewrote history) and verified against this game:
- Occlusion-query end detection — a missed end left the game spinning in its render-thread wait loop.
- GPU page-state coherency — double-buffered valid-page flags could drift and serve stale state (the same bug class made character bodies invisible in another title upstream); replaced with one coherent set. Also trims spurious re-uploads.
- APC delivery through a trap frame + cr2-cr4 / FPSCR in the fiber save area — kernel callbacks and fiber switches no longer clobber guest registers or the FP rounding mode. Silent-corruption-class fixes.
- Audio-stretch fix — stop suppressing SDL's timer-resolution management (also helps frame pacing).
- 7e3 float decode — HDR clear colors decoded with the mantissa in the wrong bit position.
- Thread-context init — a
memsetwas wipingPPCContextdefaults (including the initialmsr). - Faster file opens — exact-name stat before directory scan (streaming hitches).
- Crash diagnostics — unhandled guest access violations now log the guest address and thread; arena bases logged at boot so crash dumps can be decoded.
- 5.1 → stereo fold rewritten: the old fold discarded the LFE channel entirely (all bass — impacts, thunder — was missing from stereo/headphone mixes), used ad-hoc weights, never clamped, and the scalar path had the rear channels swapped. The new fold follows ITU-R BS.775 weights with a master-gain stage and proper clamping.
- One-shot SFX crunch root-caused: the decoder reset between sounds called
avcodec_flush_buffers, which is a no-op for the XMA codec — the previous sound's MDCT spectral tail leaked into the next sound's first frame. The reset now forces a codec reopen, which actually discards the history. - Clean audio-worker shutdown (drain with a timeout before the last-resort terminate).
Achievement support with unlock toasts ships in the runtime (thanks to the upstream SDK community). Press F7 in-game to open the achievement list and your unlock progress. Unlocks are tracked locally and persist across sessions — there is no Xbox Live, nothing leaves your machine.
- The in-game log no longer floods: per-frame diagnostic lines are gated behind opt-in cvars, and the VFS "entry not found" lines (the game legitimately probing save-backup names) dropped to debug level.
- The F4 settings overlay no longer lists dead experimental cvars — the retired native-render experiment left the build entirely (−22,000 lines).
- The non-functional DoF-scale scaffolding was removed rather than shipped broken.
- DoF disable — still open; the previous patch approach was confirmed to write FName metadata instead of the actual blur values.
- In-game audio volume sliders — still queued (Coalesced SoundGroups rewrite).
- XMA loop-wrap fix (looped ambience silences its last 192 samples per loop) — the fix exists upstream but replaces the decoder's output stage; ours is heavily customized, so it needs a dedicated session with listening tests.
- The bigger thing this release clears the deck for.
Older releases: docs/CHANGELOG.md.
| Murphy at the Silent Hill sign | Yard / twilight |
|---|---|
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| Bedroom — Ukrainian localization in-game | Rusty key pickup — Ukrainian item description |
|---|---|
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 |
DownpourRecomp is a native Windows port of Silent Hill: Downpour (Konami / Vatra Games, Xbox 360, 2012). The original Xbox 360 game is converted into a regular Windows program — once and for all, at build time — so it runs on your PC the same way as any other Windows app.
If you've used Xenia or RPCS3 before, this is not that. There is no emulator, no JIT translator, no per-frame interpretation overhead. The PowerPC code in the original binary is translated into native x86-64 C++ ahead of time, then linked against a small host runtime that handles the Xbox-specific parts (input, kernel calls, GPU command processor, EDRAM). The result is a real downpour.exe that boots like any other game.
This technique is called static recompilation — the same idea behind N64: Recompiled, Skate 3 Recomp, and DPRecomp (the same author's Deadly Premonition port). DownpourRecomp uses the ReXGlue SDK — a Xenia-derived Xbox 360 host runtime — as the foundation.
Silent Hill: Downpour never received an official PC release; this project exists to be that release: a native Windows process, full mouse + keyboard support, 60 FPS, and the entire CPU side running at native x86-64 speed.
Note
You provide your own legally-owned copy of the game. The release zip is the host shell only. It does not contain default.xex, game data, music, or any Konami / Vatra assets. See What you need before playing.
How this was built — transparency note (AI assistance)
This project uses AI assistance (Claude Code) alongside hands-on reverse-engineering and engineering work. Where the line falls:
Hands-on work that drove every key decision: Ghidra reverse-engineering of the base XEX and TU1 PE; RenderDoc captures and pixel-history bisection (chromatic-noise fix, DXT5 alpha forensic); ~55 instrumented playtest sessions with frame-time logs analysed by hand; A/B testing every render-path decision; manual identification of community recipes. The test bench is real and named honestly: Intel Core i5-13400F + RTX 5070 + Win 11.
Where AI assistance was used: C++ implementation of SDK additions once the design was decided; HLSL shader writing; CMake/build automation; documentation drafts. Every word reviewed by a human before merging; technical claims grounded in real measurements or captures.
Never delegated: what renders incorrectly and what the user actually sees; what ships and what doesn't (broken experiments get reverted byte-perfect, not left in); architecture trade-offs.
If something feels off about a claim in these docs, open an issue — we'll back it up with the underlying capture / log / measurement, or correct the docs.
Comparison vs Xenia and the Xbox 360
| Xbox 360 (original) | Xenia emulator | DownpourRecomp | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 720p (HDMI) | up to 4K (DSR) | up to 4K, native 1080p default + 2× SSAA |
| Frame rate | 30 FPS | 30 FPS (UE3 cap) | 60 FPS unlocked (recompile-time patch) |
| Input | Xbox 360 controller only | XInput controllers | XInput + native mouse & keyboard |
| First-run setup | disc | dumped XEX + game data | your own ISO → built-in installer wizard |
| Settings UI | in-game options menu | Xenia F11 / config files | standalone launcher + in-game F4 overlay |
| CPU execution | PowerPC native | Dynamic recompiler (JIT) | Statically recompiled to native x86-64 |
| CPU requirement | n/a | AVX-capable | any x86-64 CPU with SSSE3 (v1.1.7+) |
| Shader cache | n/a | rebuilds per-driver-update | ships pre-warmed (~1,370 PSOs) |
| Achievements | Xbox Live | no | local unlocks + toasts, F7 list (v1.1.7+) |
| Colour grade | as authored | none | 7 ASC-CDL presets |
| Portable layout | n/a | %AppData% / OS paths | saves + cache stay in the game folder |
| Modding hooks | none | limited | C++ source-level hooks |
The download is the application only. You bring the game:
- A legally-owned copy of Silent Hill: Downpour for Xbox 360 — disc, digital download, or backup of either. Region USA or EUR (
title id 4B4E0823, base XEX hash7A3D5809776EE6AB). - A dump of that copy — since v1.1.7 a plain ISO of your disc is enough: the first-run wizard extracts everything itself (Redump / XGD3 / raw layouts auto-detected) and stages Title Update 1 for you. Pre-extracted file trees from older versions keep working as before.
- A Windows 10/11 x86-64 PC with a D3D12-capable GPU (RTX 30-series or equivalent recommended for 1080p 60).
Important
Do not ask in the issue tracker or anywhere else where to get the game. Bring your own legally-acquired copy.
- Download the latest release zip: DownpourRecomp →
- Extract it somewhere with read/write access (e.g.
C:\Games\DownpourRecomp\). - Double-click
PlayDownpour.exeand hit Play. - First run: the installer wizard asks for your game dump — point it at your ISO (or an already-extracted
assets/tree) and, when prompted, at yourdefault.xexpTitle Update file (or let it download TU1). Extraction is resumable if interrupted. - Play. First boot compiles the GPU-vendor shader library (~13 s on an RTX 5070); every subsequent boot is instant.
In-game: F4 — settings overlay (hot-reloadable cvars), F7 — achievements, F3 — diagnostics. The launcher's tabs (Graphics / Mouse / Controls / UE3 Engine / Debug) cover the same settings with sliders, and write them to downpour.toml next to the executable.
The layout is portable: saves, config, and the warm shader cache all live in the game folder. Move the folder — everything moves with it.
Default controls (mouse + keyboard)
| Action | Default key | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Move | W A S D |
Left-stick emulation |
| Camera | Mouse | Raw-input mouse look (v1.1.7 semantics) |
| Attack | LMB |
Gamepad X |
| Block | RMB |
Gamepad Y |
| Throw / shoot (RT) | LMB |
Right-trigger chord |
| Lock-on / aim (LT) | RMB |
Left-trigger chord |
| Run / sprint | Shift |
Right-shoulder |
| Look back | Z |
Left-shoulder |
| Interact / select | E |
Gamepad A |
| Cancel / drop item | G |
Gamepad B |
| Flashlight | F |
Left-stick press |
| Zoom camera | MMB |
Right-stick press |
| Inventory / heal | ↑ (or 1) |
D-Pad up |
| D-Pad down / left / right | ↓ ← → (or 2 3 4) |
|
| Open journal | Tab |
Gamepad Back |
| Pause menu | Esc |
Gamepad Start |
DualSense (PS5): full support over USB and Bluetooth, Level-1 adaptive triggers on by default (Weapon-mode RT with a click-point break, Feedback-mode LT). All 9 trigger parameters exposed in the launcher's Controls tab. Xbox controllers work out of the box.
Rebinding: launcher → Controls tab — every action is a text field (W, LMB, Up, Shift, …). Saved straight into downpour.toml.
Runtime configuration reference (downpour.toml excerpt)
For most users the launcher's tabs cover everything. Power-users who edit downpour.toml directly — the key shipped defaults:
# ===== Render path & quality =====
render_target_path_d3d12 = 'rov' # auto-pinned to 'rtv' on AMD by the launcher
resolution_scale = 2 # 2x SSAA (auto-seeded to 1 on <8GB VRAM)
anisotropic_override = 5 # 16x AF
swap_post_effect = 'fxaa'
skip_depth_color_7e3_aliasing_transfers = true # chromatic-noise fix
# ===== Present =====
present_effect = 'fsr3'
d3d12_present_frame_limiter = true
d3d12_present_frame_limiter_fps = 60.0
# ===== 60 FPS lock =====
video_mode_refresh_rate = 120.0 # guest expects half-vblank ticks
vsync = true
# ===== Shader-compile stutter control =====
pso_missing_policy = 'skip'
d3d12_pso_no_block_at_submission_end = true
d3d12_pso_library_enable = true
# ===== Input =====
mnk_mode = true
mnk_capture_mouse = true
mnk_use_raw_input = true # v1.1.7 raw-input mouse look
mnk_raw_input_scale = 0.6
mnk_stick_scale = 800.0
mnk_deadzone_compensation = 4000
mnk_invert_y = false
# ===== Correctness pins (do NOT flip) =====
readback_memexport = true # required for HUD text
gpu_allow_invalid_fetch_constants = falseThe launcher round-trips this file non-destructively — keys it doesn't recognise are preserved.
Is this an emulator?
No. An emulator runs the original Xbox 360 instructions on a virtual CPU at runtime. DownpourRecomp converts the Xbox 360 instructions into native x86-64 code at build time, so what you run is a real Windows executable. The game is "re-translated" once, not interpreted on every frame.
Why isn't the game executable included? Where do I get it?
Including the game's binary or any of its data would be copyright infringement. Bring the ISO / XEX from your own legally-owned copy of the Xbox 360 release. We will not tell you where to download one, and asking will get your issue closed.
Can I unlock the frame rate above 30 FPS?
60 FPS is the default since v1.0 — the frame-skip patch is applied to the recompiled C++ source at build time, with video_mode_refresh_rate = 120 + vsync = true so the game logic runs the full guest tick. Beyond 60 FPS is not planned: UE3's tick code was tuned for 30/60, and uncapped framerates break animation, physics, and camera per-system.
Does mouse and keyboard work?
Yes — this is the first time the game can be played with a mouse and keyboard, and since v1.1.7 mouse look runs on raw input with direct displacement mapping (no smoothing lag, no drift). Every controller button is rebindable to keyboard/mouse via the launcher's Controls tab or F4 in-game. See the mouse tuning guide.
Do achievements unlock?
Yes, since v1.1.7 — locally. Unlocks pop a toast in-game, persist across sessions, and the full list with your progress is on F7. There is no Xbox Live backend, so nothing syncs to Microsoft servers — and nothing needs to.
What about ultrawide, HDR, ray tracing?
2012 UE3 title — no native HDR or RT. Ultrawide is not aspect-corrected yet (you'd get a stretched 16:9 image); a proper UE3 FOV patch is on the long-term list.
I get error 0xc0000142 when launching.
STATUS_DLL_INIT_FAILED. Most common cause: missing Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64) — install from https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe and reboot. (Note: the other historic cause — a pre-2013 CPU without AVX2 — is fixed in v1.1.7; the runtime now needs only SSSE3.)
Still failing? Check Windows Defender quarantine (restore rexruntimerd.dll and add an exclusion), re-extract to a path with no non-ASCII characters, verify file sizes match the release page, and confirm Windows 10 1909+ / Windows 11.
I'm getting a crash / artefact / weird behaviour. What do I do?
Open a GitHub Issue with: the exact symptom and scene, a screenshot/video if visual, the logs/ folder, your downpour.toml, and your GPU model + driver version. Do not attach any game files.
Building from source
Windows 10/11 x86-64, Visual Studio 2022 (17.8+) with C++ workload, CMake ≥ 3.25, Ninja ≥ 1.11, LLVM/Clang on PATH, and a legal copy of the game (title id 4B4E0823, hash 7A3D5809776EE6AB).
# 1. Build the SDK (Downpour fork)
git clone https://github.com/LittleBitUA/rexglue-sdk-dpour.git
# 2. Provide your XEX at assets/default.xex (gitignored)
# 3. Generate the recompiled sources
rexglue codegen --manifest downpour_manifest.toml
# 4. Configure + build
cmake -G Ninja -B out/build/win-amd64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
-DREXSDK_DIR=<path-to-rexglue-sdk-dpour>
ninja -C out/build/win-amd64 downpourProduces downpour.exe + rexruntimerd.dll. Deploy them together — they are a matched pair.
- 📦 v1.0 release overview — test methodology, frame-time distribution, what ships in the zip.
- 🚀 v1.0 performance journey — every perf-relevant change from v0.1.1 to v1.0.
- 📜 Chromatic-noise fix — RenderDoc pixel-history backward trace to the depth→7e3 ownership transfer.
- 🌫 DoF disable — investigation history — 11 approaches tried and why each failed.
- ⚫ DXT5 / BC3 alpha decode bug · 📏 Resolution-scale notes · 🐛 Known issues
- 📋 Full release history
The runtime DLL next to downpour.exe comes from a Downpour-specific fork of the ReXGlue SDK — source is public: LittleBitUA/rexglue-sdk-dpour (dpour-main branch). It carries the PSO stutter fixes, memexport readback batching, the v1.1.7 raw-input mouse driver, the audio-mix fixes, DualSense adaptive triggers, and the upstream v0.10 correctness ports.
- The Xenia team — the D3D12 GPU backend that ReXGlue derives from is their work.
- The ReXGlue SDK maintainers for the static recomp tooling and the steady stream of upstream fixes.
- Alexbeav for the first-run disc-image installer (PR #27) — the project's first external code contribution.
- Everyone who filed issues with logs, screenshots, and hardware details — the AVX2 fix, the VSync fix, the mouse rework, and the save-backup safety net all started as your reports.
- The static-recomp recipe pioneered by N64: Recompiled.
This repository contains no Konami or Vatra Games assets, no game code, no game data, no game audio. It is original code (build configuration, codegen metadata, application shell) that targets a separately-supplied, legally-owned copy of Silent Hill: Downpour.
Do not distribute the game executable, game data, or any binary that links against game data. Pull requests that include game content will be rejected.
Host-side source is released under the BSD 3-Clause license — see LICENSE. The recompiled game code produced at build time (generated/default/) is derived from the copyrighted game binary and is not covered by this license.