Control

Control pairs the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with the AMD Radeon RX 9070, producing a dataset that clearly separates the workloads of the CPU and GPU across three resolutions and four quality presets. The measured frames per second (FPS) show a system where the GPU is the dominant factor at higher resolutions, while the CPU’s capabilities become more apparent as the resolution drops. This analysis walks through the measured rows to interpret what the numbers mean for gameplay, component balance, and settings selection.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 is steep and consistent across all settings, indicating that the Radeon RX 9070 is the primary limiting component as pixel count rises. At High settings, the average FPS falls from 118.2 at 1080p to 86 at 1440p, then to 60 at 4K — a reduction of roughly 49% from the lowest to highest resolution. The pattern is similar for Low settings, where the average drops from 184.6 at 1080p to 139.9 at 1440p, and finally to 96 at 4K. This scaling shows that the GPU’s rendering workload scales nearly linearly with resolution, which is expected for a game like Control that relies heavily on pixel shading and post-processing effects.

The most informative comparison is between the Low and Ultra presets. At 1080p, Low yields 184.6 FPS while Ultra yields 100.8 FPS, a gap of 83.8 FPS. At 4K, Low yields 96 FPS while Ultra yields 49 FPS, a gap of 47 FPS. The absolute difference shrinks at higher resolutions because the GPU becomes saturated, but the relative penalty for Ultra settings remains large. The data suggests that at 1080p, the CPU has enough headroom to push well beyond 100 FPS even on Ultra, but at 4K, the GPU’s ceiling constrains performance to roughly half of that. The 1440p results sit in a middle ground: High settings produce 86 FPS, which is playable, while Ultra produces 78.6 FPS, showing that the GPU still has some margin before hitting the 4K wall.

GPU Role

The Radeon RX 9070’s specifications explain much of this scaling behavior. With 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, the card has ample bandwidth (644.6 GB/s) for high-resolution textures, which is critical in Control’s detailed environments. The boost clock of 2520 MHz and game clock of 2070 MHz support the high FPS counts seen at 1080p and 1440p, where the GPU is not fully bound by memory bandwidth. The 3584 shading units and 128 ROPs deliver raw pixel throughput, reflected in the pixel rate of 322.6 GPixel/s, which helps maintain 60 FPS at 4K High.

However, the measured results show that the GPU’s performance is not uniform across presets. At 4K Ultra, the average FPS drops to 49, which is below the 60 FPS threshold that many players consider smooth. This suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional effects — likely higher-quality reflections and volumetric lighting — push the GPU past its comfort zone. The fact that 4K Medium (64.2 FPS) outperforms 4K High (60 FPS) by a small margin, while 4K Low (96 FPS) nearly doubles the Ultra score, indicates that the card’s compute resources scale efficiently with reduced settings. In benchmark terms, the GPU’s average score of 34780 places it in the 79th percentile among all GPUs, with nearest rivals like the NVIDIA A2 (deltaPct -0.2) and AMD Quadro GV100 (deltaPct 0.3) showing that this is a mid-to-high-tier card, not a flagship.

How This Combo Ranks

The combined CPU-GPU pairing ranks 510 out of 1636 tested combos for Control, placing it in the upper third of the database. This rank reflects a balance where the GPU’s strong absolute performance is somewhat tempered by the CPU’s older architecture. The Ryzen 5 5600G, with its 6 cores and 12 threads, achieves an average benchmark score of 19983, which is in the 78th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Core i7-11600H (deltaPct 0.2) and the Intel Core i7-11800H (deltaPct -0.2), indicating that the 5600G’s multi-threaded performance is competitive with mobile H-series chips from the same era.

The combo rank of 510 suggests that in Control, the pairing is well-matched for 1440p gaming but leaves performance on the table at 1080p. At 1080p Low, the system hits 184.6 FPS, which is likely CPU-bound in some scenes, but the CPU’s single-thread score of 872 in 3dMark indicates it cannot fully feed the GPU at extremely high frame rates. Conversely, at 4K, the GPU’s workload dominates, and the CPU’s slower memory bandwidth (51.2 GB/s) does not bottleneck the 644.6 GB/s available to the GPU. The rank reflects this: the combo is neither a top-tier pairing for esports-style frame rates nor a budget compromise, but a solid mid-range option that excels at higher resolutions where the GPU is the star.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured rows, the best experience depends on the target resolution. For 4K, the data clearly points to High settings as the sweet spot: 60 FPS average is achievable, while Medium (64.2 FPS) offers a marginal improvement and Ultra (49 FPS) falls below acceptable smoothness. Low at 4K (96 FPS) is overkill for most displays and sacrifices visual fidelity unnecessarily. For 1440p, High (86 FPS) and Medium (96.5 FPS) both provide smooth gameplay, but High is recommended for the better visual quality without a significant FPS penalty — the drop from Medium to High is only 10.5 FPS. Ultra at 1440p (78.6 FPS) is still playable but shows diminishing returns.

At 1080p, the recommendation is less obvious. Ultra (100.8 FPS) is perfectly smooth, and High (118.2 FPS) is even better, but the gap between Medium (133 FPS) and Low (184.6 FPS) suggests that players with high-refresh monitors might prefer Medium for the extra headroom. The data indicates that the CPU begins to limit performance at 1080p Low, where the 184.6 FPS average is likely near the system’s practical ceiling. For most users, High at 1080p offers the best balance, as the 118.2 FPS average exceeds the refresh rate of typical 144 Hz displays while maintaining robust visual detail.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the FPS range is broad. Low settings produce an average of 184.6 FPS, which is the highest in the entire dataset. Medium drops to 133 FPS, High to 118.2 FPS, and Ultra to 100.8 FPS. The step from Low to Medium is a 51.6 FPS reduction, while the step from High to Ultra is only 17.4 FPS, showing that the Ultra preset adds effects that are less demanding than the jump from Low to Medium.

At 2560x1440, the averages are 139.9 FPS for Low, 96.5 FPS for Medium, 86 FPS for High, and 78.6 FPS for Ultra. The drop from Low to Medium is 43.4 FPS, and from High to Ultra is 7.4 FPS, indicating that the GPU is becoming more sensitive to high-quality settings as resolution increases. At 3840x2160, the averages are 96 FPS for Low, 64.2 FPS for Medium, 60 FPS for High, and 49 FPS for Ultra. The gap between Low and Medium is 31.8 FPS, while High to Ultra is 11 FPS. Across all resolutions, the Ultra preset consistently costs the most FPS relative to High, but the absolute penalty grows with resolution.

CPU Role

The Ryzen 5 5600G’s specifications provide context for its role in these results. With 6 cores and 12 threads based on Zen 3 architecture, it offers solid multi-threaded performance for a desktop chip. Its boost clock of 4.40 GHz and base clock of 3.90 GHz are modest by modern standards, but its single-thread performance, as measured by a 3dMark single-thread score of 872, is sufficient for most games. The 16 MB L3 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core help reduce latency, which is important for Control’s physics and AI systems.

However, the CPU’s integrated Radeon Vega 7 graphics and 65 W TDP indicate that this is not a high-end processor, and its memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s is a bottleneck in CPU-bound scenarios. In the measured data, the CPU’s influence is most visible at 1080p Low, where the 184.6 FPS average likely approaches the limit of what the 5600G can feed to the RX 9070. At higher resolutions and settings, the GPU becomes the limiting factor, and the CPU’s slower memory subsystem has less impact. The CPU’s average benchmark score of 19983, with a percentile of 78, confirms that it is a capable mid-range chip, but its nearest rivals — the Intel Core i7-11600H and i7-11800H — are mobile parts that trade blows within 0.2% in average score, showing that the 5600G is not a performance leader. For Control specifically, the CPU handles the game’s logic without causing frame rate drops at 1440p or 4K, but at 1080p with low settings, it becomes the ceiling for maximum FPS.