Control

The pairing of AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D with the older NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 produces a deeply CPU-heavy bottleneck in Control, a game that scales heavily with single-thread performance. The data shows a combo that ranks in the bottom percentile of tested configurations, with frame rates that fluctuate wildly based on resolution and settings. The RTX 2060, a Turing-generation card from 2019, is the definitive limiting factor here, as even at 1080p Low, the system’s average frame rate of 110.1 FPS suggests the GPU is at its ceiling while the 9950X3D’s 16 cores remain largely underutilized.

FAQ

*Q: What is the overall performance ranking of this CPU and GPU combination in Control?*

A: This combo ranks 1355th out of 1636 tested combinations in the game, placing it in the bottom 17% of all configurations. The high percentile of the CPU (96th vs all CPUs) contrasts sharply with the GPU’s lower standing, highlighting the mismatch.

Q: How does the Ryzen 9 9950X3D compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The 9950X3D’s average benchmark score of 71,660 is 0.9% higher than the Intel Xeon Platinum 8270’s 71,056, and 1.8% above the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X’s 70,420. It trails the Intel Xeon 6517P by 1.9% (73,050) and beats the Intel Core i7-14700KF (70,104) by 2.2%.

Q: What is the RTX 2060’s standing among other GPUs based on benchmark data?

A: The RTX 2060 sits at the 58th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 16,074. Its nearest rival, the AMD Radeon RX 7600S, scores 15,996 (0.5% slower), while the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M and Pro 5700 both score 16,351 (1.7% faster).

Q: What is the frame rate difference between Low and Ultra settings at 1080p?

A: At 1920x1080, the average frame rate drops from 110.1 FPS on Low settings to 58.3 FPS on Ultra, a decrease of 51.8 FPS. This represents a 47% performance reduction when moving from the lowest to the highest preset.

Q: How does the frame rate scale from 1080p to 4K at High settings?

A: At High settings, the average frame rate falls from 67.4 FPS at 1920x1080 to 53 FPS at 2560x1440, then further to 34.7 FPS at 3840x2160. The drop from 1080p to 4K is a 32.7 FPS difference, indicating significant GPU strain at higher resolutions.

Q: Does the game data show a consistent pattern across all resolution and settings combinations?

A: Yes, the pattern is uniform. For every resolution, Low settings yield the highest average FPS, followed by Medium, then High, with Ultra consistently producing the lowest frame rates. This holds true across all three tested resolutions, confirming the GPU’s performance ceiling.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060’s role in this configuration is defined by its 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, providing 336.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The card’s base clock is 1365 MHz with a boost clock of 1680 MHz, and it houses 1920 shading units alongside 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores. These specifications, while capable for 1080p gaming in 2019, are woefully insufficient for the demands of Control at higher resolutions with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D feeding it data.

The benchmark results illustrate this GPU bottleneck clearly. At 3840x2160 Ultra, the system averages only 33.1 FPS, while dropping to Low settings at the same resolution raises this to 53.9 FPS. The 6 GB VRAM capacity is a likely constraint at 4K, as the game’s textures and effects can exceed this limit, forcing the GPU to rely on slower memory paging. The 12 nm TU106 chip, with a transistor count of 10,800 million and a die size of 445 mm², operates at a 160 W TDP, but its raw throughput of 6.451 TFLOPS FP32 is the hard limit here.

The RTX 2060’s 58th percentile ranking among all GPUs places it firmly in the mid-range category. Its nearest rival, the AMD Radeon RX 7600S, is virtually identical in performance (0.5% delta), which underscores that this card is not a high-end solution. In Control, the GPU’s shading units and texture mapping units (120 TMUs) are the primary drivers of frame rate, and the data shows that the CPU is never the limiting factor. Even at 1080p Low, where the CPU could theoretically push higher frame rates, the GPU caps out at 110.1 FPS, indicating the rendering pipeline is fully saturated.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a classic GPU-bound scaling pattern across resolutions. At Low settings, the average frame rate drops from 110.1 FPS at 1920x1080 to 79.3 FPS at 2560x1440, a 30.8 FPS decrease, and then to 53.9 FPS at 3840x2160, another 25.4 FPS drop. This steep decline—a total of 56.2 FPS from 1080p to 4K—indicates that the RTX 2060’s fill rate and memory bandwidth are overwhelmed as pixel count increases.

The scaling is less severe at Ultra settings but still pronounced. At 1920x1080 Ultra, the system hits 58.3 FPS, which falls to 44.8 FPS at 2560x1440 (a 13.5 FPS drop) and then to 33.1 FPS at 3840x2160 (an 11.7 FPS further drop). The percentage reduction from 1080p to 4K at Ultra is 43%, which is slightly less than the 51% reduction at Low, suggesting that the GPU is already so saturated at 1080p Ultra that additional resolution has diminishing relative impact.

The data shows a clear inflection point between 1440p and 4K. At High settings, the jump from 2560x1440 (53 FPS) to 3840x2160 (34.7 FPS) represents an 18.3 FPS loss, while the move from 1080p (67.4 FPS) to 1440p (53 FPS) is only a 14.4 FPS loss. This non-linear scaling is characteristic of a GPU hitting its memory bandwidth ceiling, as the 336.0 GB/s interface struggles to feed the increased pixel workload at 4K. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D’s dual-channel DDR5 memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s is irrelevant here, as the bottleneck is entirely on the graphics card side.

How This Combo Ranks

With a combo rank of 1355 out of 1636 tested configurations, this pairing of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and RTX 2060 sits in the bottom 17% of all combinations for Control. This ranking is a direct consequence of the GPU’s limitations, as the CPU is a top-tier part. The 9950X3D’s 96th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 71,660, places it ahead of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8270 (71,056, 0.9% slower) and the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (70,420, 1.8% slower).

The stark contrast between the CPU’s high standing and the GPU’s mid-range position (58th percentile) creates a severely imbalanced system. The RTX 2060’s average benchmark score of 16,074 is nearly identical to the AMD Radeon RX 7600S (15,996), but this level of performance is simply not sufficient for a game like Control that pushes visual fidelity. The combo’s rank indicates that the vast majority of tested systems—1,635 configurations total—deliver better frame rates in this title, meaning the 9950X3D’s power is almost entirely wasted in this pairing.

The data suggests that the bottleneck is so pronounced that even the CPU’s massive L3 cache (128 MB shared) and 16 cores cannot compensate for the GPU’s 6 GB VRAM and 6.451 TFLOPS of compute. The combo’s ranking is consistent across all settings, as the GPU remains the limiting factor even at 1080p Low, where the system only achieves 110.1 FPS. This is a configuration that would likely see significant performance gains from a GPU upgrade, as the CPU has ample headroom to drive much higher frame rates.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows a clear tiered progression across settings. Low settings deliver an average of 110.1 FPS, which is the highest score in the entire dataset. Medium settings reduce this to 76.7 FPS, a 33.4 FPS drop, while High settings yield 67.4 FPS, another 9.3 FPS decrease. Ultra settings produce 58.3 FPS, which is 51.8 FPS lower than Low and indicates the GPU is heavily taxed by the game’s highest presets.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates scale down proportionally. Low settings average 79.3 FPS, which is 30.8 FPS lower than the 1080p Low result. Medium settings deliver 55.8 FPS, High settings produce 53 FPS, and Ultra settings drop to 44.8 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1440p is 34.5 FPS, which is slightly less than the 51.8 FPS gap at 1080p, suggesting that the GPU’s pixel throughput is becoming the dominant constraint.

At 3840x2160, the average frame rates fall below playable thresholds for most presets. Low settings produce 53.9 FPS, which is the only setting above 40 FPS at this resolution. Medium settings yield 38.9 FPS, High settings give 34.7 FPS, and Ultra settings bottom out at 33.1 FPS. The difference between Low and Ultra at 4K is 20.8 FPS, which is the smallest absolute gap across all resolutions. This compression of frame rates at 4K indicates that the GPU is hitting its absolute performance ceiling, regardless of the visual complexity being rendered.

The full dataset shows that the RTX 2060 cannot maintain 60 FPS at 1080p on High or Ultra settings, and it cannot hit 60 FPS at 1440p on any preset except Low. At 4K, no setting achieves a 60 FPS average, with the best result being 53.9 FPS at Low. These measured results confirm that this combination is best suited for 1080p Low or Medium settings if smooth gameplay is the priority, and that higher resolutions require significant compromises in visual quality.