Control

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti delivers a robust 1440p experience in Control, with the data showing a clear preference for the High preset as the optimal balance of visual fidelity and performance. At 2560x1440, the High preset achieves 91.9 FPS, which is 10.7 FPS higher than Medium and 10.7 FPS lower than Low, but the jump to Ultra costs 10.7 FPS, dropping to 81.2 FPS. The High preset’s margin over Ultra is more significant than its deficit to Medium, making it the sweet spot for maintaining high frame rates without sacrificing the game’s atmospheric lighting and particle effects. At 1920x1080, High delivers 120.2 FPS, comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold and only 16.4 FPS behind Medium, while Ultra still holds at 104.8 FPS. For 4K, High is the only sensible choice, as it produces 63.6 FPS, barely above playable, whereas Medium falls to 72.6 FPS and Ultra drops to 53.5 FPS, which is below the smoothness standard for action-adventure titles.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data across all three resolutions indicates that the High preset is the most consistent performer, providing the best experience per the measured rows. At 1920x1080, High yields 120.2 FPS, which is more than double the 4K High result and 15.4 FPS ahead of 1440p High, showing that this combo has ample headroom at the lowest resolution. The jump from High to Ultra at 1080p costs 15.4 FPS, a 14.7% reduction, while the jump from Medium to High only costs 16.4 FPS, a 12.0% reduction; this asymmetry favors High as the point of diminishing returns. At 2560x1440, High’s 91.9 FPS is ideal for high-refresh-rate monitors, as it remains above the 90 FPS mark while Ultra drops to 81.2 FPS, a 10.7 FPS penalty that is not justified by the marginal visual gains. The 4K data reinforces this: High’s 63.6 FPS is the only preset above 60 FPS, with Medium at 72.6 FPS being technically smoother but still within the same playable range, while Ultra’s 53.5 FPS introduces noticeable stutter in combat sequences. Benchmark results indicate that users should prioritize High across all resolutions, as it consistently sits within 10-15 FPS of Medium but avoids the steep performance cliff of Ultra, particularly at 4K where the gap between High and Ultra is 10.1 FPS.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, with its 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus, provides a memory bandwidth of 912.4 GB/s, which is critical for Control’s destructible environments and physics-heavy scenes. The GPU’s boost clock of 1665 MHz and base clock of 1365 MHz, combined with 10,240 shading units and 80 RT cores, directly influences the frame rate scaling observed in the data. The passmark G3D score of 26896 places this GPU in the 83rd percentile among all GPUs, and its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, is only 0.5% ahead in average benchmark score, indicating that the 3080 Ti is near the top of the performance hierarchy. In Control, the GPU’s 34.10 TFLOPS FP32 throughput is the primary driver of the 1080p Low result of 195 FPS, which is the highest recorded score in the dataset, showing that the card has spare compute when not bottlenecked. However, the 12 GB VRAM capacity becomes a limiting factor at 4K Ultra, where the 53.5 FPS result suggests that memory pressure and texture streaming are taxing the card, as the 912.4 GB/s bandwidth cannot fully compensate for the higher resolution demands. The GPU’s end-of-life production status and 350 W TDP indicate it is a high-power part, but the measured FPS data shows it remains competitive, with the 4K High result of 63.6 FPS proving its capability for this title.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is steep but consistent across presets, revealing that the RTX 3080 Ti is the primary bottleneck at higher resolutions. Starting at 1920x1080 High, the 120.2 FPS result drops to 91.9 FPS at 2560x1440, a 28.3 FPS reduction (23.5% decrease), and then to 63.6 FPS at 3840x2160, a further 28.3 FPS reduction (30.8% decrease from 1440p). This linear pattern of roughly 28 FPS per resolution step indicates that the GPU’s rasterization throughput is scaling predictably with pixel count, and the CPU’s high performance is not masking any GPU limitations. At 1080p Low, the 195 FPS result drops to 142.6 FPS at 1440p and then to 95.4 FPS at 4K, with the delta between each step being 52.4 FPS and 47.2 FPS respectively; this larger absolute drop at Low settings confirms that the GPU is saturated even at the lowest quality, as the CPU has ample headroom. The Ultra preset shows the smallest relative drop, from 104.8 FPS at 1080p to 81.2 FPS at 1440p (23.6 FPS drop) and 53.5 FPS at 4K (27.7 FPS drop), which is a shallower curve than Low, suggesting that at Ultra, the GPU is already near its limits at 1080p and cannot scale as efficiently. This behavior indicates that the limiting component is the GPU across all resolutions, as the frame rate scales inversely with pixel count in a near-linear fashion, and the CPU’s 3DMark max-thread score of 10067 and single-thread score of 1212 are sufficient to feed the GPU at every tested setting.

How This Combo Ranks

In the comprehensive database of tested combinations, this pairing of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ranks 455th out of 1636 combos for Control, placing it in the top 27.8% of all systems tested. This rank is notable because the CPU is in the 90th percentile of all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 37780, while the GPU is in the 83rd percentile, yet the combo’s in-game rank is lower than either component’s individual percentile, indicating that Control is not fully utilizing the CPU’s capabilities. The CPU’s nearest rival, the Intel Xeon 6353P, has an average score of 37811, a 0.1% delta, and the Intel Core i9-13900HK is 0.6% ahead, but these differences are negligible in real-world gaming. The GPU’s nearest rivals include the RTX 3090 at 0.5% ahead and the RTX 5070 at 1.1% ahead, showing that the 3080 Ti is closely matched with newer and higher-tier cards. The 455th rank out of 1636 combos suggests that while this system is above average, many other combinations with higher-tier GPUs or more optimized pairings achieve better results in Control, likely due to the game’s heavy reliance on GPU compute rather than CPU cache or core count. The data shows that the combo’s 4K High result of 63.6 FPS is competitive, but it is not a top-tier performer, as the top-ranked combos likely exceed 70 FPS at 4K Ultra based on the percentile distribution.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with its 8 cores and 16 threads, provides a strong foundation for Control, but the game’s benchmark results indicate that the CPU is not the limiting factor in this pairing. The CPU’s base clock of 4.70 GHz and boost clock of 5.20 GHz, combined with 96 MB of shared L3 cache, deliver exceptional single-thread performance, as evidenced by the 3DMark single-thread score of 1212 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 4800. In multi-threaded workloads, the 3DMark 16-thread score of 10081 and Cinebench R23 multicore score of 34004 show that the CPU can handle parallel tasks, but Control’s frame rates do not scale with these scores, as the FPS differences between presets are driven by GPU load. The CPU’s 90th percentile ranking and average benchmark score of 37780, which is within 0.7% of the Intel Core i5-13600KF, suggest that it is a top-tier gaming processor, but the combo rank of 455 out of 1636 indicates that the GPU is the binding constraint. At 1080p Low, the 195 FPS result is nearly three times the 4K Low result of 95.4 FPS, and this wide gap proves that the CPU can push high frame rates when the GPU load is low, but the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s 8 cores are not fully utilized in Control’s engine, as the game is primarily GPU-bound. The CPU’s 4nm process node and 8,315 million transistors on a 70.6 mm² die contribute to its efficiency, but the measured FPS data shows that the GPU’s 12 GB VRAM and 34.10 TFLOPS compute are what determine the final frame rates, particularly at higher resolutions where the CPU’s single-thread dominance cannot overcome GPU bandwidth limitations.