Control

This pairing of an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 produces a striking imbalance in Control. The data shows a system where the GPU is overwhelmingly the dominant component, capable of pushing frame rates that far exceed what the CPU can consistently feed at lower resolutions. This analysis breaks down the measured performance across settings and resolutions, and explains what the numbers mean for a builder considering this combination.

Settings Recommendations

For a game like Control on this hardware, the choice of preset is a direct trade-off between visual fidelity and frame rate headroom, but the measured data shows that High is the sweet spot for most users. At 1920x1080, the High preset delivers an average of 163.7 FPS, which is a massive drop from the 216.2 FPS seen on Low, but it is still well above the refresh rate of most high-end monitors. The jump from High to Ultra at 1080p only costs 20.8 FPS (from 163.7 to 142.9), which might tempt some users to max out the game, but the performance cost becomes more pronounced at higher resolutions.

The data suggests that Ultra is best reserved for 1080p and 1440p displays where the frame rate remains above 100 FPS. At 2560x1440, Ultra still produces a very playable 108.5 FPS average. However, at 3840x2160, the Ultra preset drops to 73.4 FPS, which is where the experience starts to feel less fluid for fast-paced action. The Medium preset offers a balanced middle ground, providing 187 FPS at 1080p and 138.6 FPS at 1440p, but it sacrifices the visual effects that make Control's environments so distinctive. Given that the High preset provides 124.4 FPS at 1440p and 85.9 FPS at 4K, it is the recommended default for this combo, offering a strong blend of quality and performance without requiring the user to compromise on resolution.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 is the clear star of this benchmark. With 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus, it offers a memory bandwidth of 960.0 GB/s, which is more than sufficient for Control's textures and effects at any resolution. The GPU's architecture, Blackwell 2.0 on a 5 nm process from TSMC, features 10752 shading units and 112 ROPs. The boost clock of 2617 MHz helps drive a pixel rate of 293.1 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 879.3 GTexel/s.

Looking at the raw compute performance, the RTX 5080 achieves 56.28 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. This raw power translates into the benchmark results, where the GPU is clearly the limiting factor at 4K. The difference between the Low and Ultra presets at 3840x2160 is 57.6 FPS (from 131 to 73.4), which shows how heavily the GPU is taxed by the game's higher-quality rendering features. The 16 GB VRAM capacity is a significant advantage here, as it ensures that even at 4K with Ultra settings, the game does not run into memory capacity limits, allowing the GPU to focus purely on processing frames rather than managing data swaps. The RTX 5080's production status is Active, and it was released on 2025-01-29, making it a current-generation part that is well-suited for this title.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K clearly illustrates where the bottleneck lies in this system. At 1080p with Low settings, the system averages 216.2 FPS. Moving to 1440p Low drops that to 199.8 FPS, a relatively small 16.4 FPS decrease. However, jumping to 4K Low brings the average down to 131 FPS, a massive 68.8 FPS drop from 1440p. This pattern indicates that at lower resolutions, the CPU is starting to hold the system back, but as resolution increases, the GPU becomes the primary constraint.

The scaling on the High preset tells a similar story. The system hits 163.7 FPS at 1080p, falls to 124.4 FPS at 1440p, and then sinks to 85.9 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 39.3 FPS, while the drop from 1440p to 4K is 38.5 FPS. This consistent decline suggests that the GPU is scaling as expected with resolution, but the relatively high frame rates at 1080p indicate that the Ryzen 5 5600 is struggling to keep up. The 216.2 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low is likely close to the CPU's maximum frame output in this title, meaning that the RTX 5080 is not being fully utilized at that resolution and settings combo.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full dataset reveals a comprehensive picture of performance. At 1920x1080, the system delivers 216.2 FPS on Low, 187 FPS on Medium, 163.7 FPS on High, and 142.9 FPS on Ultra. The gap between Low and Ultra is 73.3 FPS, which shows a significant performance cost for maximum visual quality. At 2560x1440, the averages are 199.8 FPS on Low, 138.6 FPS on Medium, 124.4 FPS on High, and 108.5 FPS on Ultra. The gap between Low and Ultra here is 91.3 FPS, indicating that the higher resolution amplifies the cost of the Ultra preset.

At 3840x2160, the results show a more compressed range: 131 FPS on Low, 95.5 FPS on Medium, 85.9 FPS on High, and 73.4 FPS on Ultra. The difference between Low and Ultra at 4K is 57.6 FPS, which is smaller than at 1440p. This is because at 4K, even the Low preset is heavily loading the GPU, leaving less headroom for the settings to make a difference. The data shows that the High preset at 4K (85.9 FPS) is comparable to the Ultra preset at 1440p (108.5 FPS) in terms of frame rate, but with a significant resolution advantage. For a 60 Hz display at 4K, even the Ultra preset is playable, but for higher refresh rate 4K panels, dropping to High or Medium is necessary.

How This Combo Ranks

In the broader context of tested hardware combinations, this specific pairing of the Ryzen 5 5600 and RTX 5080 ranks at 95 out of 1636 combos for Control. This places it in the top 5.8% of all tested systems, which is a strong showing. The high rank is almost entirely attributable to the GPU's performance, as the RTX 5080's average benchmark score of 59188 puts it in the 89th percentile of all GPUs. In contrast, the Ryzen 5 5600 has an average benchmark score of 21765, placing it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs.

The ranking suggests that while the CPU is not the absolute fastest, it does not cripple the system's overall performance in this game. The combo's rank of 95 is likely higher than what the CPU alone would achieve, confirming that the RTX 5080 is doing the heavy lifting. However, it also implies that there are 94 other combinations that perform better, many of which likely pair the RTX 5080 with a stronger processor. This ranking serves as a warning that while this combo is fast, it is not maximizing the potential of the RTX 5080, particularly in CPU-bound scenarios at lower resolutions.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture, codenamed Vermeer. It has a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz. With a TDP of 65 W, it is a power-efficient chip, but its performance in Control shows its limits. The CPU's benchmark results are solid, with a Cinebench R23 multicore score of 18309 and a single-core score of 2584. This single-core performance is crucial for gaming, and it helps the system achieve high frame rates.

However, the data shows that the Ryzen 5 5600 becomes a bottleneck at 1080p. The fact that the average FPS at 1080p Low (216.2) is not drastically higher than at 1440p Low (199.8) suggests that the CPU is hitting its maximum frame delivery rate. The CPU's 32 MB of shared L3 cache is generous, and its memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s on a dual-channel DDR4 interface is adequate, but it cannot keep up with the RTX 5080's raw frame production capabilities. In the nearest rival comparisons, the Ryzen 5 5600's average benchmark score of 21765 is only 0.6% higher than the Intel Xeon D-1746TER and 0.9% lower than the Intel Core i7-11700F. This indicates that while the CPU is not weak, it is not in the same league as the GPU in terms of overall performance potential. For Control, this means the CPU will often be the component that prevents the frame rate from scaling linearly with resolution, especially on lower settings where the GPU is not fully stressed.