Control

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti pairing delivers a playable but heavily GPU-bound experience in Control, with performance scaling that clearly shifts as resolution and settings change. At 1080p, the combination is capable of pushing well past 100 FPS at lower presets, but the demanding 4K Ultra setting drops the average to 36.3 FPS, indicating a system that is consistently limited by the graphics card rather than the processor. The measured results show a clear hierarchy where the GTX 1080 Ti, despite its age, remains the primary bottleneck across most configurations tested.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate trajectory from 1080p to 4K demonstrates a classic GPU-bound curve, with the most dramatic drops occurring at higher resolutions and fidelity settings. At 1080p High, the system averages 84.4 FPS, which falls to 61.8 FPS at 1440p and further to 44.5 FPS at 4K. This represents a 47% reduction in performance from 1080p to 4K at High settings, a substantial penalty that underscores the pixel throughput demands of the Pascal architecture’s 484.4 GB/s memory bandwidth.

The scaling becomes even more pronounced when comparing the Low preset across resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 133.7 FPS, which drops to 99.6 FPS at 1440p and 65.3 FPS at 4K. The 1080p to 1440p transition at Low settings shows a 25% performance loss, while the jump to 4K costs another 34% of the frame rate. This pattern indicates that even at the lowest settings, where CPU overhead is minimal, the GPU’s raw rasterization power is the limiting factor.

Interestingly, the gap between Medium and High presets narrows at higher resolutions. At 1080p, Medium scores 93.3 FPS versus 84.4 FPS for High, a 10% difference. At 4K, the same comparison yields 49.0 FPS versus 44.5 FPS, a 10% gap that remains consistent. However, the Ultra preset shows a steeper penalty at 4K, with 36.3 FPS representing a 19% drop from High, suggesting that the most demanding settings push the GTX 1080 Ti’s 11 GB of GDDR5X memory and 3584 shading units to their absolute limits.

CPU Role

The Ryzen 5 5500 brings six cores and twelve threads based on the Zen 3 architecture, with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.20 GHz. This processor’s capabilities are well-documented in synthetic benchmarks, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 16429 and a single-core score of 2319. The multi-threaded performance is particularly relevant for Control, which can utilize multiple cores for physics and AI calculations, though the data suggests the CPU is rarely the bottleneck in this pairing.

The processor’s 3DMark results further illustrate its balanced performance profile. A single-thread score of 836 and a 16-thread score of 5386 indicate that the Ryzen 5 5500 can handle both lightly-threaded and heavily-threaded workloads effectively. The 16 MB of L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory with 51.2 GB/s bandwidth provide adequate support for the GPU, as evidenced by the fact that frame rates scale almost entirely with resolution rather than CPU clock speed variations.

The evidence for CPU headroom is most apparent in the 1080p Low results. At 133.7 FPS, the system is producing over 130 frames per second, yet the CPU still has capacity to spare, as indicated by the fact that raising settings to High at the same resolution only drops the frame rate to 84.4 FPS. This 37% performance hit from Low to High at 1080p is attributable to increased GPU workload, not CPU limitations, confirming that the Ryzen 5 5500 is sufficient to feed the GTX 1080 Ti in this title.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti achieves a combo rank of 978 out of 1636 tested combinations. This places the pairing in the lower-middle portion of the rankings, which is consistent with the hardware’s individual performance percentiles. The CPU sits at the 79th percentile among all processors, while the GPU is at the 61st percentile among all graphics cards, indicating a mismatch where the processor is comparatively stronger than the graphics solution.

The GPU’s nearest rivals in the benchmark database provide context for its performance tier. The GTX 1080 Ti scores 19402 on average, which is nearly identical to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (19405, deltaPct 0) and the AMD Radeon Pro 560X (19426, deltaPct -0.1). This clustering suggests that the GTX 1080 Ti, despite its historical significance, now performs in a similar bracket to much older or lower-tier cards. The NVIDIA TITAN Xp sits slightly above with a score of 19184 and a deltaPct of 1.1, while the NVIDIA Tesla K40m trails at 19519 with a deltaPct of -0.6.

For the CPU, the Ryzen 5 5500’s average benchmark score of 20875 places it within 0.2% of the Intel Core i5-12500 (20897, deltaPct -0.1) and the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4655GE (20900, deltaPct -0.1). The Intel Core i5-12600T is marginally ahead at 20917 with a deltaPct of -0.2. This near-tie in synthetic scores indicates that the Ryzen 5 5500 offers competitive processing power, but the combo’s overall rank of 978 is dragged down by the GPU’s relatively weaker standing.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS dataset reveals a systematic progression across all twelve tested configurations. At 1920x1080, the system delivers 133.7 FPS on Low, 93.3 FPS on Medium, 84.4 FPS on High, and 73.2 FPS on Ultra. The step from Low to Medium represents a 30% reduction, while the jump from High to Ultra costs an additional 13% of performance. This suggests that the Ultra preset introduces effects that heavily tax the GPU’s 11.34 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power.

Moving to 2560x1440, the results show 99.6 FPS on Low, 71.3 FPS on Medium, 61.8 FPS on High, and 52.5 FPS on Ultra. The 1440p High result of 61.8 FPS is notably close to the 4K Low result of 65.3 FPS, indicating that the resolution increase from 1440p to 4K at lower settings has a similar performance impact to raising settings from Low to High at a fixed resolution. This crossover point highlights the GPU’s memory bandwidth limitations, as the 352-bit bus and 484.4 GB/s throughput struggle to feed the increased pixel count.

At 3840x2160, the system produces 65.3 FPS on Low, 49.0 FPS on Medium, 44.5 FPS on High, and 36.3 FPS on Ultra. The 4K Ultra result of 36.3 FPS is below the 30 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay, while 4K High at 44.5 FPS is borderline acceptable for slower-paced action. The spread from Low to Ultra at 4K is 44%, which is narrower than the 45% spread at 1080p, suggesting that the GPU is becoming the absolute limiting factor at higher resolutions regardless of settings.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications directly explain the observed frame rates. Built on the 16 nm Pascal architecture with the GP102 chip, this GPU features 3584 shading units, 224 texture mapping units, and 88 raster operation units. The 11 GB of GDDR5X memory on a 352-bit bus provides 484.4 GB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for Control’s detailed environments and particle effects.

The GPU’s clock speeds of 1481 MHz base and 1582 MHz boost, combined with its 11.34 TFLOPS of FP32 compute, determine its rasterization throughput. The pixel rate of 139.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 354.4 GTexel/s are the key metrics for understanding why the card struggles at 4K. At that resolution, the GPU must process over 8 million pixels per frame, and the data shows that even at Low settings, the 65.3 FPS result is only 49% of the 1080p Low score of 133.7 FPS.

The GPU’s benchmark percentile of 61 places it in the lower half of tested graphics cards, and its average benchmark score of 19402 is competitive with much older hardware. The DirectX 12 score of 66 in Passmark is particularly telling, as Control utilizes DX12 features. The Vulkan score of 83108 in Geekbench suggests better performance in that API, but the game’s implementation appears to favor the GPU’s raw compute capabilities rather than its API efficiency. The 250 W TDP and dual-slot design indicate that this is a power-hungry card, but the measured results show that its performance ceiling is now firmly in the mid-range category.