Control Resonant is shaping up to be one of the year's best PC ports, lauded for its exceptional visual fidelity and robust performance across diverse hardware configurations. Remedy's latest title builds upon the groundbreaking lighting techniques seen in its previous games, particularly the original Control and Alan Wake 2, pushing visual boundaries while maintaining impressive optimization.
The game's embrace of advanced rendering techniques like path tracing significantly enhances its art style, especially on high-end PCs. However, what sets Control Resonant apart is its remarkable scalability. The title demonstrates an ability to run well even on less powerful hardware, including handheld gaming devices.
Testing on the Xbox Ally X revealed surprisingly strong performance. With a handheld graphics preset and FSR set to quality, the game maintained a playable frame rate around 40-45 fps at 1080p during intense moments, even with significant on-screen action. While occasional drops into the mid-30s were noted, the overall smoothness, coupled with support for FSR frame generation, allows for a more fluid experience. Frame generation can even simulate frame rates exceeding 60 fps, though this comes with a slight increase in latency.
The Steam Deck, however, presents a greater challenge. Even with optimized settings at 720p and FSR on balanced, the four-and-a-half-year-old handheld struggles to consistently maintain above 25 fps, making it a less ideal platform for the game.
On more powerful desktop systems, Control Resonant excels. The official PC system requirements recommend an RTX 4070 Ti for medium settings with ray tracing enabled to achieve 60 fps. In testing with an RTX 4070 Ti Super at 1440p, medium preset, medium ray tracing, and DLSS balanced, the game averaged 111 fps with a 1% low of 81 fps. This performance significantly exceeds Remedy's recommendations.
Pushing the settings further to 1440p, the Ultra preset with path tracing, and DLSS balanced, still yielded an impressive average of 70 fps with a 1% low of 58 fps. Even accounting for the performance difference between the tested RTX 4070 Ti Super and the recommended RTX 4070 Ti, the game is expected to perform well above the stated 60 fps target without utilizing frame generation.
When frame generation is enabled on an RTX 4070 Ti, the frame rate can jump to 118 fps, with the pre-frame-gen rate sitting around 60 fps. This provides an exceptionally smooth experience on high-refresh-rate monitors. Intriguingly, due to Remedy's implementation where Nvidia Reflex is tied to frame interpolation, enabling frame generation actually results in reduced latency compared to having it off.
Given the visual splendor of Control Resonant, its excellent performance across a broad spectrum of hardware makes it a standout PC port. For players with capable gaming PCs, acquiring Control Resonant on Steam is highly recommended.