Control

Control pairs a 12-core Zen 5 flagship with a Turing-era midrange GPU, and the benchmark results show a combination that is decisively limited by the graphics card at every resolution and settings preset tested. The data indicates that the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X provides more than enough compute headroom, leaving the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 as the sole arbiter of frame rates in this Action Adventure title. The measured FPS curve across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K tells a clear story of GPU saturation, where the CPU's 24 threads and 64 MB of shared L3 cache are largely idle resources.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows show a clear hierarchy for optimal playability. At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers an average of 109.5 FPS, which is the only configuration in the entire dataset to exceed the 100 FPS threshold. This makes Low the definitive choice for high-refresh-rate monitors at this resolution, as it provides a 39.2 FPS advantage over the next-fastest preset, Medium, which averages 74.3 FPS. For users seeking visual fidelity without sacrificing smoothness, Medium at 1080p is the balanced pick, offering a 73.5% higher frame rate than Ultra while still maintaining a playable 74.3 FPS average.

Moving to 2560x1440, the Low preset again leads with 82.4 FPS, a figure that remains comfortably above the 60 FPS target for most displays. The Medium preset at this resolution drops to 56.5 FPS, which is a significant step down, while High and Ultra hover at 51.7 and 48.2 FPS respectively. The data suggests that 1440p users should stick with Low to maintain responsiveness, as the gap between Low and Medium is a substantial 25.9 FPS. At 3840x2160, no preset achieves 60 FPS; Low is the only viable option at 57.1 FPS, with Medium falling to 39.5 FPS and Ultra collapsing to 28.2 FPS. The recommendation is unambiguous: Low settings at 4K for playable performance, or Low at 1440p for the best balance of resolution and frame rate.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 ranks 1331 out of 1636 tested combos in Control, placing it in the bottom 18.6% of all configurations. This low ranking is not a reflection of the CPU's capabilities—the 9900X sits in the 94th percentile against all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 54450—but rather a direct consequence of the GPU's position in the 58th percentile against all GPUs. The data shows a massive imbalance: the CPU is a top-tier part while the GPU is a mid-range part from a previous generation, and Control's engine is clearly GPU-bound in this pairing.

Benchmark results indicate that the 9900X's nearest rivals in synthetic tests—the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D at 54681 average score (0.4% ahead), the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K at 55304 (1.5% ahead), and the Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF at 55421 (1.8% ahead)—all produce nearly identical CPU performance. The Intel Core i7-14700F trails the 9900X by 0.7% with a score of 54097. Yet none of this CPU headroom translates into FPS gains in Control, because the RTX 2060's nearest rivals—the AMD Radeon Pro 5700 and Pro 5600M at 16351 (1.7% ahead), the AMD Radeon RX 7600S at 15996 (0.5% behind), and the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 at 15786 (1.8% behind)—show that the GPU is operating in a tightly clustered performance band. The combo's rank of 1331 reflects a hardware pairing where the CPU's 12 cores and 5.60 GHz boost clock are effectively wasted on a game that cannot utilize them due to the GPU bottleneck.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is the definitive limiting factor in this configuration. Its 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus delivers 336.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is insufficient for the demands of Control at higher settings and resolutions. The GPU's 1920 shading units and 48 ROPs, clocked at a base of 1365 MHz and boost of 1680 MHz, produce a peak FP32 throughput of 6.451 TFLOPS. These specifications place the card in the 58th percentile against all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 16074.

The measured FPS data shows the GPU's VRAM and compute limits directly. At 4K Ultra, the average FPS drops to 28.2, a 51% reduction from the 4K Low preset's 57.1 FPS. This steep decline is characteristic of a GPU running out of memory bandwidth and shading capacity, not a CPU limitation. The RTX 2060's 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores are present but do not rescue performance in this title, as the benchmark results show no ray tracing-specific gains. The GPU's 12 nm process node and 10,800 million transistors produce a 160 W TDP, but the card's end-of-life production status suggests it is outclassed by modern titles at high settings. In Control, the RTX 2060 delivers playable frame rates only at Low settings across all resolutions, confirming that its 6 GB frame buffer and 192-bit bus are the hard constraints.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows a clear scaling pattern. Low settings yield 109.5 FPS, which is the peak performance for this combo. Medium drops to 74.3 FPS, a 32.2% reduction, while High further declines to 70.3 FPS, only 4 FPS below Medium. Ultra bottoms out at 57.5 FPS, a 47.5% reduction from Low. The minimal difference between Medium and High (4 FPS) suggests that the GPU is already saturated at these settings, with the extra visual features providing diminishing returns.

At 2560x1440, the pattern shifts. Low produces 82.4 FPS, which is 27.1 FPS lower than the 1080p Low result, showing a clear resolution penalty. Medium falls to 56.5 FPS, High to 51.7 FPS, and Ultra to 48.2 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium widens to 25.9 FPS, indicating that the GPU's memory bandwidth is becoming a bottleneck at higher resolutions. The 1440p Ultra result of 48.2 FPS is only 9.3 FPS below the 1080p Ultra result, suggesting that the GPU is consistently limited by its raw compute rather than resolution-specific factors.

At 3840x2160, the results become marginal. Low is the only preset above 50 FPS at 57.1, while Medium drops to 39.5, High to 35.5, and Ultra to 28.2. The 4K Ultra result is 29.3 FPS below the 1080p Ultra result, a 50.9% reduction. This severe drop at 4K underscores the RTX 2060's inability to handle the pixel count, with the 6 GB VRAM and 336 GB/s bandwidth proving inadequate for Control's high-resolution textures and effects.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K reveals the GPU-bound nature of this pairing. At Low settings, the transition from 1920x1080 (109.5 FPS) to 2560x1440 (82.4 FPS) represents a 24.7% reduction, and then to 3840x2160 (57.1 FPS) a further 30.7% reduction from 1440p. The cumulative drop from 1080p to 4K at Low is 52.4 FPS, or 47.9% of the original frame rate. This scaling is steeper than a purely geometric resolution increase would suggest, indicating that the GPU's memory bandwidth is the limiting factor.

At Ultra settings, the scaling is even more punishing. The 1080p Ultra result of 57.5 FPS drops to 48.2 FPS at 1440p (a 16.2% reduction) and then to 28.2 FPS at 4K (a 41.5% reduction from 1440p). The 4K Ultra result is less than half of the 1080p Ultra result, a 50.9% total reduction. This non-linear scaling points to VRAM capacity exhaustion—the 6 GB frame buffer is likely spilling over at 4K Ultra, causing severe frame rate collapse.

The data suggests that the CPU is never the bottleneck. At 1080p Low, the 9900X is capable of feeding the RTX 2060 to its maximum of 109.5 FPS, but the GPU cannot push higher. The 12-core CPU's 3DMark single-thread score of 1286 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 6555 indicate ample single-thread performance, yet the measured FPS does not improve with lower resolution beyond what the GPU allows. The resolution scaling confirms that this combo is limited by the RTX 2060's fill rate and memory subsystem, not by the Ryzen 9 9900X's substantial compute resources.