Control Resonant, Remedy's recent character action game, offers a compelling experience but falls short of its potential on Valve's Steam Deck. Despite earlier indications of Steam Deck support, the game's demanding visuals and complex environments prove too taxing for the portable device, resulting in sub-par performance. However, the more powerful Steam Machine fares considerably better.
On the Steam Deck OLED, even with the 'Handheld' graphics preset and FSR upscaling set to Performance mode, the game struggles to achieve a stable 30 frames per second. Framerates frequently dip into the low-to-mid twenties during gameplay in the game's warped New York City setting. These performance issues are exacerbated by frequent stutters, likely caused by the device's limited 16GB of combined RAM and VRAM. Adjusting FSR to its Ultra Performance mode does little to improve the situation and degrades visual clarity significantly, making combat difficult to follow.
Disabling additional graphics options like SSAO and post-processing effects such as motion blur and depth of field outside of the preset does not yield substantial improvements, with framerates rarely exceeding 25fps in most areas. The game's substantial 105GB install size further compounds the issues for the Steam Deck. Consequently, the Steam Deck is not recommended for playing Control Resonant.
In contrast, the Steam Machine demonstrates much greater capability. At a 1080p resolution and with ray tracing features disabled, the Steam Machine can maintain a playable 40-50fps in demanding open-world sections when set to medium graphics. On the High preset, framerates typically sit between 35-45fps. Employing Quality-level FSR upscaling on the High preset can push performance into the 50-65fps range.
Further tweaking of individual graphics settings on the Steam Machine yielded minor performance gains, generally around 14%, by adjusting lighting and reflection settings. These adjustments can help maintain framerates above 60fps in certain city environments, particularly when paired with a high-refresh-rate monitor. The inclusion of FSR Frame Generation was found to provide a smoother visual experience, pushing perceived framerates to 100fps and above, though it introduces a slight input lag that may be undesirable for the game's fast-paced melee combat.
Enabling ray tracing, however, proved highly detrimental. It initially caused the game to crash and required a switch to the SteamOS Experimental Proton branch for stable launches. Even with the Low RT preset and optimized settings, framerates plummeted into the twenties, making it an unviable option. The game's SteamOS hardware compatibility ratings were also notably absent shortly before its release, serving as a potential warning for players hoping for seamless Deck integration.