Control

Control launched in August 2019 as an action adventure built around heavy real-time lighting and destruction, and it has become one of the more demanding games in our database. Pairing it with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 creates an interesting imbalance: a 68th-percentile GPU sitting alongside a 75th-percentile CPU. The question is whether that pairing holds up when the frame-rate demands rise, and the recorded data gives a clear answer at every resolution from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160.

Measured FPS Breakdown

Starting at 1920x1080, the measured averages show a configuration that is comfortably ahead of the game at every preset. Low settings deliver 146.6 FPS, Medium rises interestingly close behind at 130.3 FPS, and High still manages 119.7 FPS. Even Ultra, the most demanding preset, holds at 100 FPS exactly. The spread between Low and Ultra is only 46.6 FPS, which is remarkably narrow, and it suggests the CPU is exerting a ceiling effect at this resolution rather than the GPU running out of headroom.

At 2560x1440, the numbers step down predictably: Low lands at 137.1 FPS, Medium at 102.8 FPS, High at 87.4 FPS, and Ultra at 76.5 FPS. All four presets clear the 60 FPS playability threshold with room to spare. The gap between Low and Ultra widens to 60.6 FPS compared to the 46.6 FPS seen at 1080p, which indicates the GPU is now doing meaningful work at the higher pixel count.

The 3840x2160 results are where the limits appear. Low settings still produce a strong 94.5 FPS, Medium drops to 67.1 FPS, and High sits at 62.1 FPS, just above the 60 FPS line. Ultra, however, falls to 51.7 FPS, which is below the playable threshold. The spread between Low and Ultra at this resolution is 42.8 FPS, the narrowest of the three resolutions, which again hints at a processor-side constraint influencing even the high-resolution results.

Minimum and maximum frame rates were not recorded for these runs, so the analysis rests on averages alone. Still, the averages themselves tell a coherent story across all twelve resolution-and-preset combinations.

CPU and GPU Roles

The scaling between resolutions reveals which component is in charge. From 1920x1080 to 2560x1440, Low-settings performance falls only 9.5 FPS, from 146.6 to 137.1 FPS, a drop of roughly six percent for a seventy-eight percent increase in pixel count. That is textbook CPU limitation. When the processor cannot feed frames fast enough, raising the resolution barely dents the average.

The pattern repeats at the top presets. Ultra goes from 100 FPS at 1080p to 76.5 FPS at 1440p, a 23.5 FPS loss, and then to 51.7 FPS at 4K, a further 24.8 FPS loss. Those steps are GPU-driven, as expected when the RTX 3080's Ampere architecture, with its 68 RT cores and 29.77 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, has to render four times the pixels of 1080p.

The Ryzen 5 2600's profile explains the ceiling. It is a 6-core, 12-thread Zen+ processor with a 3.40 GHz base clock, a 3.90 GHz boost clock, and a Passmark single-thread score of 2239 alongside a multithread score of 13160. Its database percentile against all CPUs is 75. That is a capable processor, but Control is a game where per-core throughput matters, and the 1080p results, capped near the high 140s even at Low settings, show the CPU drawing the line the GPU cannot cross.

In short: at 1920x1080 the CPU is the limiter, at 3840x2160 the GPU is the limiter, and 2560x1440 is the transition zone where the two are reasonably matched.

How This Combo Ranks

Within our Control leaderboard, this pairing ranks 1179 out of 3720 tested combinations. That places it in the top third of all recorded configurations for this game, which aligns with what the frame rates suggest: strong but not elite performance.

The rank also reflects the component imbalance. A RTX 3080 with a stronger CPU would presumably climb the chart further, given how clearly the 1080p numbers show processor limitation. The GPU sits in the 68th percentile against all graphics cards in the database, while the CPU sits at 75, yet in gaming contexts the GPU's 23172 average benchmark score and 25086 Passmark G3D result are doing the heavy lifting at higher resolutions.

FAQ

Q: Can this PC run Control at 4K with max settings?

A: No. Ultra at 3840x2160 averages 51.7 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS playable threshold. High is the highest preset that clears the bar at that resolution, averaging 62.1 FPS.

Q: What is the best resolution and preset combination for this hardware?

A: 1920x1080 at Ultra averages exactly 100 FPS, making it the highest preset that delivers a triple-digit frame rate. For higher resolutions, 2560x1440 at Ultra averages 76.5 FPS.

Q: Is the Ryzen 5 2600 a bottleneck for the RTX 3080 in Control?

A: At 1920x1080, yes, effectively. The Low preset produces 146.6 FPS, and the step up to 1440p costs only 9.5 FPS, indicating the CPU is capping the frame rate. At 1440p and 4K the GPU becomes the primary limiter.

Q: How much performance is lost going from Medium to Ultra?

A: At 1920x1080, 30.3 FPS (130.3 to 100). At 2560x1440, 26.3 FPS (102.8 to 76.5). At 3840x2160, 15.4 FPS (67.1 to 51.7), though at 4K that loss pushes Ultra below the playable threshold.

Q: Does this combination clear 60 FPS at every resolution?

A: At 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, every preset clears 60 FPS. At 3840x2160, Low, Medium, and High clear it, but Ultra at 51.7 FPS does not.

Q: How does the Ryzen 5 2600 compare to similar CPUs in the database?

A: Its average benchmark score of 21484 sits within a fraction of a percent of the Intel Core Ultra 5 228V (0.2 percent), Intel Core i9-11900H (0.5 percent), Intel Xeon D-1746TER (minus 0.7 percent), and AMD EPYC 9454 (1.2 percent).

Similar Performance Alternatives

On the CPU side, the database shows four processors with nearly identical aggregate scores. The Intel Core Ultra 5 228V scores 21440, just 0.2 percent below the Ryzen 5 2600, and the Intel Core i9-11900H sits 0.5 percent behind. Above it, the Intel Xeon D-1746TER scores 21635, 0.7 percent ahead, and the AMD EPYC 9454 is 1.2 percent behind at 21223. Any of these should produce broadly comparable CPU-side behavior in Control, though the specific balance of single-thread and multi-thread throughput may shift the 1080p ceiling slightly in either direction.

On the GPU side, the nearest rivals by average score are an eclectic group: the NVIDIA P106-100 at 23249, the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 at 23250, the AMD Radeon RX 6600M at 23273, and the AMD Radeon R9 M290X at 23276, all within half a percent of the RTX 3080's 23172 aggregate. Swapping in any of these would, according to the aggregate data, yield near-identical results, though users should note that Control's heavy use of ray-traced effects favors hardware with dedicated RT resources, which the RTX 3080's 68 RT cores provide in abundance.

Best Settings per Resolution

Based on the recorded averages and the 60 FPS threshold:

• 1920x1080: Ultra, averaging 100 FPS. The most demanding preset is fully viable, with a 40 FPS cushion over the threshold.
• 2560x1440: Ultra, averaging 76.5 FPS. A 16.5 FPS cushion keeps the maximum preset comfortable at this resolution.
• 3840x2160: High, averaging 62.1 FPS. Ultra drops to 51.7 FPS and fails the threshold, so High is the ceiling, though the margin here is thin at just 2.1 FPS.

Players wanting more headroom at 4K could step down to Medium at 67.1 FPS, trading visual fidelity for a sturdier average.

The Verdict

Yes, this PC can run Control, and run it well. At 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, every preset from Low through Ultra clears 60 FPS, with best results of 100 FPS and 76.5 FPS respectively. At 3840x2160, Low, Medium, and High are playable, with High as the best setting at 62.1 FPS, while Ultra at 51.7 FPS falls short.

The data describes a configuration whose GPU strength carries the high-resolution experience and whose 6-core, 12-thread CPU sets a firm but generous ceiling at lower resolutions. For a 2019 release like Control, that ceiling sits well above the playability line. The only compromise required is a single preset step at 4K, and everything else is headroom.