Control

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 combination delivers a thoroughly playable Control experience across the board, with the data showing a clear hierarchy between settings presets and resolutions. At 1080p, the pairing pushes well past high-refresh territory, while 4K remains viable for those who prioritize visual fidelity over raw frame rates.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows show that the High preset offers the most balanced experience for this hardware pairing, particularly at 1440p where it hits 94.9 FPS. This is a sweet spot that provides substantial headroom above the 60 FPS threshold while maintaining the visual quality that Control’s atmospheric environments demand. At 4K, High still manages 60.4 FPS, which is exactly at the standard for smooth gameplay, making it the only preset that keeps 4K playable without compromises.

For users targeting 144Hz or higher refresh rates, dropping to Medium at 1080p yields 139.6 FPS, which is close enough to the mark that most players would perceive it as fluid. The Low preset is the outlier for competitive or maximum-frame-rate scenarios, producing 191.3 FPS at 1080p and 146 FPS at 1440p, but the visual downgrade in a game like Control—which relies heavily on its surreal lighting and particle effects—is a poor trade-off for most.

Ultra is the most demanding setting, and the data shows it costs a significant frame-rate penalty: at 4K it drops to 54.7 FPS, which is below the smoothness threshold, and even at 1080p it only reaches 107.7 FPS. The performance gap between Medium and Ultra at 1440p is 22.9 FPS (from 106 to 83.1), which indicates that the extra visual fidelity from Ultra settings is not worth the loss in responsiveness for most gameplay scenarios. The optimal recommendation is High for 1080p and 1440p displays, with Medium as a fallback for those who want to push higher refresh rates.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is the dominant component in this pairing for Control, as the game’s GPU-bound nature is evident from the FPS scaling patterns. The card features 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, which is ample for Control’s texture streaming at all tested resolutions. The 4K results confirm this: the frame rate scales consistently with settings changes, and the 12 GB capacity prevents any memory-related stuttering that could otherwise cap performance.

The GPU’s boost clock of 2475 MHz, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with 5888 shading units, provides the raw compute headroom needed for the game’s physics-heavy combat sequences. The data shows that at 1080p Low, the RTX 4070 reaches 191.3 FPS, which is close to the practical ceiling for this title and indicates that the CPU is not the limiting factor at lower resolutions. The RTX 4070’s 81st percentile ranking among all GPUs places it firmly in the upper tier, though its nearest rivals—including the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 and NVIDIA GeForce MX570 A—are within a 2% delta, showing that Control is not particularly sensitive to GPU architectural differences at this performance level.

The GPU’s FP32 throughput of 29.15 TFLOPS is what drives the higher preset performance, as Control’s visual effects scale heavily with compute throughput. When comparing the 1080p High result of 124 FPS to the 4K High result of 60.4 FPS, the halving of frame rate at quadruple the pixel count is precisely what would be expected from a purely GPU-limited scenario. This confirms that the RTX 4070 is doing the heavy lifting, while the Ryzen 5 9600X’s role is to feed it data fast enough—a task it handles without becoming a bottleneck at any tested setting.

FAQ

Q: Can this system run Control at 4K with smooth frame rates?

A: Yes, but only on the High settings preset, which produces an average of 60.4 FPS. The Medium preset drops to 70.3 FPS, while Ultra falls to 54.7 FPS, which is below the standard for smooth gameplay.

Q: What is the best preset for high-refresh-rate monitors?

A: At 1080p, the Medium preset is the best choice for 144Hz displays, hitting 139.6 FPS. For 240Hz monitors, the Low preset is required, as it reaches 191.3 FPS, but the visual compromise is significant.

Q: How much performance does the Ultra preset cost compared to High?

A: The penalty for Ultra over High is consistent across resolutions: 16.3 FPS at 1080p, 11.8 FPS at 1440p, and 5.7 FPS at 4K. The relative cost is higher at lower resolutions, suggesting diminishing returns from the extra settings.

Q: Is the Ryzen 5 9600X a bottleneck for the RTX 4070 in this game?

A: No, the data shows the system is GPU-limited. At 1080p Low, the FPS reaches 191.3, which is high enough that any CPU limitation would manifest as a plateau across settings, but the frame rate scales consistently with resolution and quality changes.

Q: How does this combo rank against other tested hardware configurations?

A: The combination ranks 375th out of 1,636 total tested combos for Control, placing it in the top 23% of systems. The CPU’s 85th percentile ranking and the GPU’s 81st percentile ranking support its position as a high-end pairing.

Q: What memory bandwidth does the RTX 4070 provide for this game?

A: The card offers 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth through its 192-bit bus, which is sufficient for the 12 GB GDDR6X frame buffer. This bandwidth is not a limiting factor, as evidenced by the smooth scaling across all tested presets.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows a clear progression across settings. The Low preset achieves the highest average at 191.3 FPS, followed by High at 124 FPS, Medium at 139.6 FPS, and Ultra at 107.7 FPS. The ordering is notable because Medium outperforms High by 15.6 FPS, which suggests that the High preset enables certain effects that are disproportionately expensive at this resolution.

Moving to 2560x1440, the same pattern holds but with reduced headroom. Low hits 146 FPS, Medium reaches 106 FPS, High delivers 94.9 FPS, and Ultra trails at 83.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium is 40 FPS, while the gap between Medium and High is narrower at 11.1 FPS, indicating that the step from Low to Medium carries most of the visual benefit with a manageable cost.

At 3840x2160, the results tighten significantly. Low still leads at 100.2 FPS, but Medium drops to 70.3 FPS, High sits at 60.4 FPS, and Ultra falls to 54.7 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 45.5 FPS, which is the largest absolute range across all resolutions, but the relative differences are smaller due to the higher base resolution pushing the GPU to its limits. The jump from Medium to High at 4K is only 9.9 FPS, making the latter a viable option for those who want better visuals without sacrificing much performance.

Resolution Scaling

The transition from 1080p to 4K reveals a consistent pattern of frame rate reduction that is characteristic of a GPU-bound workload. At High settings, the FPS drops from 124 at 1080p to 94.9 at 1440p (a 23.4% reduction) and then to 60.4 at 4K (a 36.4% reduction from 1440p). This scaling is steeper than the pixel-count increase would suggest, indicating that Control’s rendering pipeline becomes more expensive per pixel at higher resolutions due to effects like volumetric lighting and reflections.

At Low settings, the scaling is more linear: 191.3 FPS at 1080p, 146 at 1440p, and 100.2 at 4K. The 1080p-to-1440p drop is 23.7%, and the 1440p-to-4K drop is 31.4%, which is closer to what pure pixel-count scaling would predict. This suggests that at Low settings, the GPU is operating in a more compute-efficient regime, while at higher presets, memory bandwidth and shading unit utilization become more significant factors.

The Ultra preset shows the most dramatic scaling: 107.7 FPS at 1080p, 83.1 at 1440p, and 54.7 at 4K. The 4K result is just 50.8% of the 1080p figure, meaning that Ultra settings at 4K effectively halve the frame rate compared to 1080p. This steep drop indicates that the RTX 4070’s 12 GB frame buffer and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth are being taxed heavily by the combination of high resolution and maximum visual effects.

Overall, the scaling analysis points to the GPU as the primary limiter across all resolutions. The Ryzen 5 9600X, with its 6 cores and 12 threads boosting to 5.40 GHz, provides ample single-thread performance to feed the GPU without becoming a bottleneck, as evidenced by the 191.3 FPS result at 1080p Low. The benchmark data confirms that this is a balanced pairing where the RTX 4070 dictates the ceiling, and the CPU rarely intervenes in the final frame rate.