Control

Control launched as an action-adventure title back in 2019, but the pairing of AMD's Ryzen 9 9900X with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 D turns it into a stress test that this hardware simply shrugs off. Measured benchmark data shows every preset at every tested resolution clearing the playable threshold by a wide margin — even Ultra at 4K sits comfortably above 60 FPS. The question worth investigating isn't whether this combo can run the game, but where, exactly, the frame rate ceiling comes from and which component draws it.

Best Settings per Resolution

The most demanding preset that holds at or above 60 FPS is easy to identify here, because all four presets qualify at all three resolutions.

At 1920x1080, Ultra delivers an average of 163 FPS. At 2560x1440, Ultra still manages 124 FPS on average. At 3840x2160, Ultra remains the best playable preset at 83 FPS average — a 38% cushion over the 60 FPS threshold.

In other words, there is no trade-off to make. The best-looking settings are also the fastest-verdict settings, and the data shows no resolution where a drop to High, Medium, or Low is necessary to reach playability. Medium at 4K is the only configuration with recorded minimum and maximum frame rates — a range of 92 to 124 FPS around a 108 FPS average — and even that recorded minimum of 92 FPS sits far above the threshold, suggesting headroom is consistent rather than sporadic.

How This Combo Ranks

Out of 3720 tested CPU/GPU combinations in Control, the Ryzen 9 9900X + RTX 5090 D pairing ranks 5th. That places it in the top fraction of a percent of all measured configurations for this specific game.

That ranking is curious given the components' individual standings. Both the 9900X and the RTX 5090 D sit in the 92nd percentile versus all CPUs and all GPUs respectively — elite, but not singular. The 9900X's average benchmark score of 57498 puts it within a tenth of a percent of the AMD EPYC 9015 and a couple of tenths ahead of the AMD EPYC 7313, while trailing the Intel Core i9-14900 by 1.1% and the Intel Xeon Platinum 8260M by 1.4%. The RTX 5090 D's average score of 77712 similarly lands it between the AMD Radeon RX 6650M XT (1.1% behind) and the Radeon RX 6850M XT (1.6% ahead).

Yet the combination ranks 5th of 3720 in Control. This gap between individual percentile and combined game rank implies Control's performance profile rewards this pairing's specific strengths — high single-thread throughput on the CPU side (a 3010 Geekbench single-core score, a 2253 Cinebench R23 single-core score) and raw rendering throughput on the GPU side — more effectively than the raw aggregate benchmark averages suggest.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080:

• Low: 298 FPS average
• Medium: 211 FPS average (min 180, max 243)
• High: 188 FPS average
• Ultra: 163 FPS average

At 2560x1440:

• Low: 225 FPS average
• Medium: 160 FPS average (min 136, max 184)
• High: 142 FPS average
• Ultra: 124 FPS average

At 3840x2160:

• Low: 152 FPS average
• Medium: 108 FPS average (min 92, max 124)
• High: 96 FPS average
• Ultra: 83 FPS average

A pattern emerges immediately. The step from Low to Ultra costs roughly 45% of the frame rate at every resolution — 163 versus 298 at 1080p, 124 versus 225 at 1440p, 83 versus 152 at 4K. That consistency is unusual. It suggests the preset ladder scales cleanly and that no single setting (ray tracing being the obvious suspect in a DX12 Ultimate-era title) introduces a disproportionate cliff.

The Medium-tier min/max data reinforces this. At 1080p Medium, the 180–243 range is tight around the 211 average. At 4K Medium, the 92–124 range around 108 is similarly disciplined. Frame-time consistency appears strong wherever it was captured.

Similar Performance Alternatives

On the CPU side, the nearestRivals data identifies hardware whose aggregate benchmark behavior closely mirrors the 9900X. The AMD EPYC 9015 scores 57555 — a 0.1% delta — making it statistically nearly identical in average benchmark terms. The AMD EPYC 7313 sits 0.2% behind. Slightly further out, the Intel Core i9-14900 leads by 1.1% and the Intel Xeon Platinum 8260M by 1.4%. In Control, where frame rates at these levels are GPU-dominated, any of these processors would likely produce similar measured results alongside the same graphics card.

On the GPU side, the AMD Radeon RX 6650M XT trails the RTX 5090 D's average score by 1.1%, with the Radeon RX 6850M XT 1.6% ahead and the NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe variants 2.1% and 2.4% ahead. The closeness of these deltas in the database's composite scoring is worth noting, though composite averages blend compute and graphics workloads — a game like Control draws on the RTX 5090 D's 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 170 RT cores, and 1.79 TB/s of GDDR7 bandwidth, specifications the averaging process doesn't weight the way a renderer does.

The practical takeaway: combinations built from CPUs in the 9900X's immediate scoring neighborhood and GPUs near the 5090 D's composite average should behave broadly similarly in this title, with the usual caveat that composite ranks hide workload-specific strengths.

CPU and GPU Roles

Which component matters more for Control on this machine? The scaling data gives a clear answer that shifts by resolution.

Compare Ultra across resolutions: 163 FPS at 1080p, 124 FPS at 1440p, 83 FPS at 4K. Moving from 1080p to 1440p costs 24% of the frame rate; moving to 4K costs another 33%. That steep decline with pixel count — with the CPU held constant — indicates the GPU becomes the binding constraint as resolution rises. At 4K, the RTX 5090 D is doing nearly all the limiting.

Now look at the low end. Low settings at 1080p reach 298 FPS, but Low at 4K reaches only 152. If the CPU were the limiter, lowering resolution and settings would plateau the frame rate at some processor-determined ceiling. Instead, frame rate keeps climbing as load drops — from 83 (4K Ultra) to 298 (1080p Low), a 258% swing. The CPU never visibly caps the system within this tested range.

The 9900X's own numbers explain why. Its single-thread results (3010 Geekbench, 1286 3DMark single-thread, 4672 PassMark single-thread) sit in the 92nd percentile of all CPUs, and Control — released in 2019, an era when eight or fewer strong cores were the norm — simply cannot saturate 12 cores and 24 threads of Zen 5 at 4.40 base and 5.60 boost clocks. The data is consistent with a GPU-bound profile at every tested resolution and preset, with CPU influence strongest only at 1080p Low, and even there not decisively.

FAQ

Q: Can the Ryzen 9 9900X + RTX 5090 D run Control at 4K on max settings?

A: Yes. Ultra at 3840x2160 averages 83 FPS, comfortably above the 60 FPS playability threshold. All four presets are playable at 4K.

Q: What is the single highest frame rate recorded for this combo in Control?

A: 298 FPS average, at 1920x1080 on Low settings.

Q: How does this combination rank against other tested pairings in Control?

A: 5th out of 3720 tested CPU/GPU combinations.

Q: Where did frame rate consistency data get captured, and what does it show?

A: At Medium settings on all three resolutions. The tightest recorded range is 180–243 FPS around a 211 average at 1080p; at 4K Medium the range is 92–124 around 108.

Q: Does dropping from Ultra to High at 4K buy much performance?

A: A moderate gain: 96 FPS on High versus 83 on Ultra — about a 16% improvement. Both clear 60 FPS, so the choice is purely visual.

Q: What CPUs benchmark closest to the Ryzen 9 9900X overall?

A: The AMD EPYC 9015 (-0.1%) and AMD EPYC 7313 (+0.2% relative to the 9900X's advantage) are nearest, followed by the Intel Core i9-14900 and Intel Xeon Platinum 8260M slightly ahead.

The Verdict

Yes — emphatically. The verdict data shows every preset from Low through Ultra is playable at all three resolutions, 1920x1080 through 3840x2160, against the 60 FPS threshold.

The headline numbers: Ultra at 83 FPS at 4K, 124 FPS at 1440p, and 163 FPS at 1080p. The 60 FPS bar is cleared by 23 FPS at worst (4K Ultra) and by 238 FPS at best (1080p Low). For a game released in 2019, running on a 2024 CPU and a 2025 GPU, the data describes a mismatch in the player's favor: rank 5 of 3720 combinations, GPU-bound scaling at every turn, and no measured configuration that fails. The only open question the data can't answer is how much higher than 298 FPS the ceiling might sit — the tested presets never found it.