In Silent Hill 2, very few models actually make use of Nanite. From the tests I’ve done, such as in the apartments, disabling Nanite has no impact since there are no meshes utilizing it.
In the forest at the beginning, I found a mesh some decorative logs that correctly switches to a low-poly fallback version when setting r.nanite=0. Overall, most of the rendering in SH2 doesn’t rely on Nanite, and the game doesn’t even use Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM), which clearly shows it’s not utilizing these systems intensively.
Considering the heavy use of vertex painting throughout the game, which Nanite doesn’t support (yes, an alternative is coming in 5.5, but the game was built on Unreal 5.1), it’s understandable that Bloober didn’t really utilize Nanite.
This raises the question of the benefit of mixing both rendering methods (classic LODs and Nanite) when the game uses Nanite so minimally, only here and there on a few meshes. It incurs a significant performance cost for little added value, especially given that the classic meshes, which make up most of the rendering, don’t even occlude the Nanite meshes.