Control

Control with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti delivers a demanding but playable experience at high resolutions, with the data showing that 4K Ultra is a stretch at 45 FPS while 1440p High at 77 FPS offers a strong balance. The CPU’s modest mobile performance keeps up at lower settings, but the RTX 5070 Ti clearly becomes the limiting factor as resolution climbs.

Resolution Scaling

The measured frames per second tell a clear story about where this combo’s bottleneck shifts. At 1080p Low, the system hits 162 FPS, which is an excellent headroom for high-refresh displays. Moving to 1080p High, the average drops to 102 FPS, a 37% reduction that suggests the GPU is already starting to feel the load from the game’s visual effects. At 1440p Low, the system still manages 123 FPS, but High at that resolution falls to 77 FPS, showing a steep 37% penalty for enabling higher settings.

The 4K results are where the scaling becomes most dramatic. At 4K Low, the average is 83 FPS, which is still playable, but stepping up to Medium yields 59 FPS, and High drops further to 52 FPS. The Ultra preset at 4K bottoms out at 45 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS target most gamers prefer for action-adventure titles. The pattern is unmistakable: from 1080p Low to 4K Ultra, the frame rate plummets from 162 to 45 FPS, a 72% reduction. This scaling indicates that the RTX 5070 Ti, with its 16 GB of GDDR7 memory and 896.0 GB/s bandwidth, is fully utilized at higher resolutions, while the CPU’s 14 cores and 18 threads keep pace at lower settings without becoming the primary constraint.

When comparing the 1080p to 1440p transition at High settings, the drop is from 102 to 77 FPS, a 25% decrease. The 1440p to 4K transition at High is steeper, going from 77 to 52 FPS, a 32% drop. This non-linear scaling suggests that the GPU’s shading units and memory bandwidth are being taxed progressively harder as pixel count increases, with the 4K resolution exposing the limits of the 8960 shading units and 280 texture mapping units. At lower settings like Low, the scaling is more forgiving—1080p Low at 162 FPS drops to 123 FPS at 1440p (24% reduction) and then to 83 FPS at 4K (33% reduction from 1440p)—indicating that the rendering pipeline has more headroom when effects are minimized.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo’s overall position in the benchmark database is mid-pack, with a rank of 1422 out of 3720 tested combinations. This places it in the 38th percentile of all combos tested for Control, meaning that over 2300 other CPU-GPU pairings deliver higher average frame rates in this specific game. The ranking reflects the balance between the mobile Intel Core Ultra 5 125H and the desktop-class RTX 5070 Ti, which creates a situation where the CPU may not fully feed the GPU in all scenarios.

Looking at the CPU’s standalone performance, the Core Ultra 5 125H scores 27507 on average across all benchmark tests, placing it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Ryzen 7 5800 with an average score of 27535 (0.1% faster) and the Intel Core i5-12600K at 27578 (0.3% faster). This tight grouping shows that the mobile chip is competitive with last-generation desktop parts in general compute, but Control’s specific demands may favor the GPU more heavily. The combo rank being lower than the CPU’s percentile suggests that pairing this mobile processor with a high-end GPU doesn’t unlock the full potential of either component in this title, likely due to the game’s engine being more sensitive to single-thread performance than to the CPU’s 18 threads.

The GPU, by contrast, sits in the 86th percentile of all GPUs with an average benchmark score of 49957. Its nearest rival is the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 at 50001 (0.1% faster), followed by the Intel Arc A550M at 49737 (0.4% slower). The fact that the GPU ranks higher than the combo does indicates that the CPU is holding back the overall result in Control, as the graphics card alone is capable of better performance than what this pairing achieves in practice.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications directly explain the measured frame rates. With 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus providing 896.0 GB/s of bandwidth, the card has ample memory capacity for Control’s textures and effects, even at 4K resolution. The 2295 MHz base clock and 2452 MHz boost clock are relatively high for a modern GPU, and the 8960 shading units provide the raw compute power needed to push high pixel counts.

The GPU’s memory configuration is particularly relevant to Control’s high-resolution performance. At 4K Ultra, the card delivers 45 FPS, which suggests that memory bandwidth is sufficient but the shading units are being fully saturated by the game’s physics and particle effects. The 280 texture mapping units and 96 render output units work together to produce a pixel rate of 235.4 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 686.6 GTexel/s, which are respectable figures for a card in this class. The measured results show that at 1440p Medium, the card achieves 87 FPS with a minimum of 74 FPS, demonstrating that it can maintain playable frame rates when not pushed to 4K extremes.

The GPU’s 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 6604 and Geekbench Vulkan score of 225122 provide additional context for its DirectX 12 and Vulkan performance, both of which are relevant to Control’s rendering API. The PassMark G3D score of 32974 places the card firmly in the upper tier of GPUs, and its 86th percentile ranking confirms its position as a high-end part. However, the measured FPS in Control at 4K High (52 FPS) and 4K Medium (59 FPS) indicate that even this powerful card struggles to maintain 60 FPS at the highest resolution with medium-to-high settings, which reflects the game’s demanding renderer rather than a weakness in the GPU itself.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run Control at 60 FPS in 4K?

A: Only at Low settings, where it achieves 83 FPS. At Medium, the average drops to 59 FPS, and High and Ultra fall to 52 and 45 FPS respectively, so 4K 60 FPS requires reducing settings to Low or using a lower resolution.

Q: What is the best resolution for this pairing?

A: 1440p offers the best balance, with High settings delivering 77 FPS and Medium hitting 87 FPS. This resolution avoids the steep performance penalty seen at 4K while still providing a significant visual upgrade over 1080p.

Q: How does the CPU affect performance in this game?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H has 14 cores and 18 threads with a boost clock of 4.50 GHz. The data shows it can keep up at lower resolutions and settings, as evidenced by the 162 FPS at 1080p Low, but the combo rank of 1422 out of 3720 suggests it may limit the GPU in certain scenarios.

Q: Is the 16 GB of VRAM sufficient for Control?

A: Yes, the 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on the RTX 5070 Ti is more than enough for Control, as the game was released in 2019 and does not require excessive memory capacity. The bottleneck at 4K is more likely compute-related than memory-related.

Q: What frame rates can I expect at 1080p with Ultra settings?

A: The measured data shows 89 FPS at 1080p Ultra, which is smooth for most displays. This is a 13% drop from High settings at the same resolution, indicating that Ultra effects are costly but still manageable.

Q: How does this GPU compare to its nearest rivals?

A: The RTX 5070 Ti has an average benchmark score of 49957, which is nearly identical to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (50001, 0.1% slower) and slightly ahead of the Intel Arc A550M (49737, 0.4% faster). It trails the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT by 2% and leads the RX 6800 XT by 3.1%.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is a mobile processor with 14 cores and 18 threads, based on the Meteor Lake architecture and built on Intel’s 7 nm process. Its base clock of 3.60 GHz can boost up to 4.50 GHz, and it features 18 MB of shared L3 cache. In general benchmarks, it scores 12804.5 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 1647.5 in single-core, placing it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rival is the AMD Ryzen 7 5800, which scores 27535 on average, just 0.1% faster than the Intel chip’s 27507.

In Control, the CPU’s role is less prominent than the GPU’s, but it still matters for overall performance. The measured FPS at 1080p Low (162) and 1440p Low (123) show that the processor can feed the graphics card enough data to reach high frame rates when the GPU is not the bottleneck. However, the combo rank of 1422 out of 3720 indicates that this pairing underperforms relative to what the GPU alone can do, which points to the CPU as a limiting factor in some scenarios. The 18 threads are more than sufficient for Control’s threading model, but the lower single-thread performance compared to desktop rivals may cause frame pacing issues in CPU-bound sections of the game.

The CPU’s PassMark single-thread score of 3399 and multi-thread score of 21100 provide context for its capabilities. The fact that it achieves 162 FPS at 1080p Low suggests that the CPU is not severely limiting at lower settings, but the scaling to 4K Ultra (45 FPS) shows that the GPU becomes the dominant constraint as resolution increases. This is a typical pattern for a mobile CPU paired with a high-end desktop GPU, where the processor’s thermal and power constraints (28 W TDP) prevent it from fully releasing the graphics card’s potential in all situations.

Settings Recommendations

For the best experience with this combo, the data points to 1440p High as the optimal configuration. At this setting, the system delivers 77 FPS, which is smooth and visually rich, with the game’s effects and textures well-represented. If a higher frame rate is preferred, 1440p Medium offers 87 FPS with a minimum of 74 FPS, ensuring no significant drops below playable levels. The jump from Medium to High at 1440p costs 10 FPS on average, which is a reasonable trade for improved visuals.

At 1080p, Ultra settings provide 89 FPS, which is excellent for high-refresh monitors, but the difference between High (102 FPS) and Ultra (89 FPS) is only 13 FPS, so most users will prefer High for the extra smoothness. For those with 4K displays, Low settings are the only option that maintains 60 FPS or higher, hitting 83 FPS. Medium at 4K drops to 59 FPS, which is borderline, while High and Ultra fall below 55 FPS, making them less ideal for action-heavy gameplay.

The worst choice is 4K Ultra at 45 FPS, which sacrifices too much fluidity for marginal visual gains. Instead, 1440p Ultra at 67 FPS provides a better balance between quality and performance, offering nearly the same visual fidelity as 4K High (52 FPS) but with 29% more frame rate. The data clearly shows that this pairing excels at 1440p, where the RTX 5070 Ti’s power is fully utilized without the CPU becoming a significant bottleneck. For competitive play or maximum smoothness, 1080p Low at 162 FPS is available, but most players will find 1440p High to be the sweet spot for this game.