Control

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data for Control reveals a pronounced GPU-bound scaling curve as resolution climbs. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 delivers 140 FPS average. Moving to 1440p Low drops that to 106 FPS, a 24% reduction, and 4K Low lands at 71 FPS, which is another 33% cut from the 1440p result. This steep decline from 1080p to 4K is the classic signature of a graphics-limited scenario—the CPU has ample headroom at lower resolutions, but the GPU's pixel throughput becomes the bottleneck as resolution increases.

At High settings, the scaling pattern shifts. The 1080p High average is 88 FPS, 1440p High falls to 67 FPS (a 24% drop), and 4K High reaches 45 FPS (a 33% drop from 1440p). The consistency of these percentage drops across Low and High settings—nearly identical 24% and 33% reductions at each step—indicates that the rendering pipeline is uniformly saturated by resolution, regardless of the quality preset. This is not a case where settings changes alter the scaling behavior; the limiting factor remains the GPU's fill rate and shading capacity.

Ultra settings tell a similar story but with lower absolute numbers. The 1080p Ultra average is 77 FPS, 1440p Ultra is 58 FPS, and 4K Ultra is 39 FPS. The 4K Ultra result of 39 FPS is particularly telling—it sits below the 45 FPS High result at the same resolution, showing that the incremental cost of Ultra over High is roughly 13% at 4K. Meanwhile, the gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is substantial: 71 FPS versus 39 FPS, a 45% performance penalty for maximum quality. This wide spread suggests that Control's Ultra preset includes expensive effects that heavily tax the RTX 4070's compute resources.

The Medium preset offers a middle ground, with 1080p at 99 FPS (min 84, max 114), 1440p at 75 FPS (min 64, max 86), and 4K at 51 FPS (min 43, max 58). The min-to-max ranges at Medium are the only complete data available for any preset, and they show roughly 15-20% variance between minimum and maximum frames. This variance is consistent across resolutions, suggesting the frame pacing is stable rather than spiky—the GPU is not experiencing sudden hitches but rather steady workload fluctuations.

What does this scaling say about the limiting component? At 1080p Low, the 140 FPS average is high enough that the CPU's 16 cores and 22 threads are likely not the constraint—the GPU is still processing frames faster than most displays can refresh. But as resolution climbs to 4K, the GPU's 1920 MHz base and 2475 MHz boost clocks are clearly working hard, and the 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth on the 192-bit bus becomes a critical resource. The data does not show any resolution where the CPU becomes the bottleneck, as the FPS declines are proportional to pixel count increases, not core utilization limits.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations for Control, this pairing of Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 holds the 1515th position out of 2888 total combos. That places it in the 52.5 percentile—essentially the median of all tested systems. This is a notable result because the individual components rank higher in their respective pools: the CPU sits at the 83rd percentile among all processors, and the GPU ranks at the 81st percentile among all graphics cards. The combo's median standing in Control specifically suggests that the game's engine or workload profile does not fully reward the hardware's general-purpose strengths.

The CPU's nearest rivals in overall benchmark scores provide context for its performance tier. The Intel Core i5-14600T scores 32707, a 0% delta from the Core Ultra 7 155H's 32697 average. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 trails by 0.1% at 32662, while the AMD Ryzen 5 7400F is 0.2% ahead at 32750, and the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H leads by 0.4% at 32812. These deltas are all within a fraction of a percent, meaning the Core Ultra 7 155H is effectively trading blows with a cluster of mid-range desktop and mobile processors. The differences are so small they would be imperceptible in real-world gaming, but they establish that the CPU is not an outlier in either direction.

On the GPU side, the RTX 4070's nearest rivals show a similar tight grouping. The NVIDIA Tesla P4 scores 37628, just 0.1% above the RTX 4070's 37648 average. The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is 0.4% behind at 37507, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile is 1.3% ahead at 38135, and the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 trails by 1.3% at 37157. The RTX 4070's position here is interesting: it sits between a professional compute card (Tesla P4) and a last-generation enthusiast GPU (RX Vega 56), while the RTX 4080 Mobile—a higher-tier laptop part—edges it out by a meaningful 1.3% margin.

Translating these component-level standings to the game-specific rank: the combo's 1515th place out of 2888 means that slightly more than half of all tested systems outperform it in Control. This is not a bad result—it is a solidly mid-pack showing—but it does indicate that Control's specific rendering demands do not align perfectly with this hardware's strengths. The game was released in 2019, before either component existed, so the software is not optimized for Meteor Lake or Ada Lovelace architectures specifically. The data suggests that newer or differently-balanced systems can extract more performance from Control, but this combo remains perfectly playable across most settings.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combo for smooth gameplay?

A: The data shows that 1440p High delivers 67 FPS average, which exceeds the 60 FPS threshold for smooth play. For higher refresh rates, 1080p High hits 88 FPS, and 1080p Medium reaches 99 FPS. At 4K, only Low settings (71 FPS) and Medium (51 FPS) approach playable levels, with Ultra at 39 FPS falling below ideal smoothness.

Q: How much performance is lost when going from 1080p to 4K?

A: At Low settings, the average FPS drops from 140 at 1080p to 71 at 4K, a 49% reduction. At High settings, the drop is from 88 to 45 FPS, a 49% reduction as well. The scaling is consistent across presets, indicating a uniform GPU-bound workload.

Q: Is the RTX 4070 or the Core Ultra 7 155H the limiting factor in Control?

A: The benchmark data indicates the GPU is the primary limiter. As resolution increases, FPS drops proportionally, which is characteristic of a graphics-bound scenario. The CPU's 16 cores and 22 threads are not shown to bottleneck at any tested resolution, as even 1080p Low (140 FPS) does not show signs of CPU saturation.

Q: Does the Ultra preset provide a worthwhile improvement over High?

A: At 1080p, Ultra (77 FPS) is 11 FPS slower than High (88 FPS), a 12.5% penalty. At 1440p, the gap is 9 FPS (58 vs 67), and at 4K it is 6 FPS (39 vs 45). The visual improvement from High to Ultra is not quantified in the data, but the performance cost is consistent across resolutions.

Q: How does this combo compare to other tested systems in Control?

A: This combination ranks 1515th out of 2888 tested combos, placing it in the 52.5 percentile. This is a median result, meaning roughly half of all tested systems perform better and half perform worse, despite the individual components ranking in the low-80s percentile overall.

Q: What frame rates can I expect at 1440p with varying quality settings?

A: At 1440p, the measured averages are: Low at 106 FPS, Medium at 75 FPS (min 64, max 86), High at 67 FPS, and Ultra at 58 FPS. These results show that even at Ultra, the combo maintains above 55 FPS, making 1440p a viable resolution for this hardware across all presets.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS dataset for Control with this hardware covers four resolutions and four quality settings, though only the Medium preset includes full min and max frame data. At 1920x1080, the results are: Low at 140 FPS average, Medium at 99 FPS (min 84, max 114), High at 88 FPS, and Ultra at 77 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 63 FPS, which represents a 45% performance range. The Medium preset's 84 FPS minimum still clears 60 FPS comfortably, making 1080p a smooth experience across all settings.

At 2560x1440, the averages scale down: Low at 106 FPS, Medium at 75 FPS (min 64, max 86), High at 67 FPS, and Ultra at 58 FPS. The 58 FPS Ultra result is the only sub-60 average at this resolution, and it is close enough that minor tweaks would likely push it over the threshold. The Medium preset's minimum of 64 FPS remains above 60, indicating good frame pacing. The drop from 1080p to 1440p at each setting is roughly 24-25%, which is less than the pixel count increase of 78%, suggesting some headroom in the GPU's rendering pipeline.

At 3840x2160, the results become more demanding: Low at 71 FPS, Medium at 51 FPS (min 43, max 58), High at 45 FPS, and Ultra at 39 FPS. The 4K Medium minimum of 43 FPS is notably low, falling below the 45 FPS High average. This indicates that Medium's specific effects can cause dips that are more severe than the average suggests. The 4K Low result of 71 FPS is the only 4K setting that maintains a comfortable margin above 60 FPS, while High and Ultra both fall into the 39-45 FPS range, which is playable but not ideal for fast-paced action.

Comparing across resolutions, the data shows that the step from 1440p to 4K is more punishing than from 1080p to 1440p. At High settings, 1080p to 1440p costs 21 FPS (88 to 67), while 1440p to 4K costs 22 FPS (67 to 45). The percentage drop is similar (24% vs 33%), but the absolute loss is comparable. At Low settings, the 4K result of 71 FPS is still higher than the 1440p Medium (75 FPS) and close to 1440p High (67 FPS), showing that resolution has a larger impact on quality settings than vice versa.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture using a 5 nm process at TSMC, with a die size of 294 mm² containing 35,800 million transistors. This translates to a transistor density of 121.8M per mm², which is high for a consumer GPU. The GPU operates at a base clock of 1920 MHz and a boost clock of 2475 MHz, with memory clocked at 1313 MHz or 21 Gbps effective. The 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus provides 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for Control's high-resolution textures and effects.

The GPU's compute resources include 5888 shading units, 184 texture mapping units, and 64 raster output units. It also features 46 ray tracing cores and 184 tensor cores, which are relevant for Control's ray-traced reflections and DLSS support, though the measured FPS data does not specify whether these features were enabled. The pixel rate is 158.4 GPixel/s and the texture rate is 455.4 GTexel/s, with FP32 performance rated at 29.15 TFLOPS (and FP16 at the same 29.15 TFLOPS with 1:1 ratio). These specs position the RTX 4070 as a high-end mobile GPU, and the data confirms it handles Control well at 1080p and 1440p.

The GPU's memory bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s appears to be a significant factor in the 4K results. At 4K, the GPU must feed 8.3 million pixels per frame, and the 12 GB frame buffer can hold high-resolution textures without swapping. The 4K Low result of 71 FPS suggests the GPU can maintain decent throughput when texture quality is reduced, but the drop to 39 FPS at Ultra indicates that the combination of high-resolution rendering and maximum-quality textures saturates the memory system and shading units. The 192-bit bus width is narrower than higher-tier cards, but the GDDR6X speed compensates partially.

In the broader GPU benchmark context, the RTX 4070 scores 37648 on average, placing it at the 81st percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA Tesla P4, is only 0.1% different, showing how tightly clustered the mid-to-high-end GPU market is in synthetic tests. The RTX 4080 Mobile leads by 1.3%, while the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 trails by 0.4%. These small deltas suggest that in Control, the RTX 4070's real-world performance is more dependent on driver optimization and game-specific workloads than on raw compute scores.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a mobile processor from the Core Ultra Series 1, built on the Meteor Lake architecture using Intel's 7 nm process. It features 16 cores and 22 threads, with a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 4.80 GHz. The TDP is rated at 28 W, which is low for a processor with this core count, indicating efficient power management. The cache hierarchy includes 112 KB L1 per core, 2 MB L2 per core, and 24 MB of shared L3 cache. Memory support is DDR5, dual-channel, with a bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s.

In Control, the CPU's role appears secondary to the GPU, as the FPS scaling is dominated by resolution changes. However, the CPU's 22 threads could be relevant for the game's physics and AI computations, which run alongside rendering. The 4.80 GHz boost clock is sufficient for single-threaded tasks, and the 24 MB L3 cache helps with data locality. The CPU's integrated graphics (Arc Xe-LPG 128EU) are present but not used in this configuration, as the discrete RTX 4070 handles all rendering.

The CPU's benchmark scores show strong multi-threaded performance: Cinebench R23 multicore scores 15028, while single-core scores 1743. Passmark multithread scores 24873, with integer math at 86870 and floating point at 63703. These results place the CPU at the 83rd percentile of all processors, with an average benchmark score of 32697. In gaming, the single-core performance is often more critical, and the 1743 Cinebench R23 single-core score is respectable but not top-tier, which may explain why the combo's Control rank is only median.

The nearest rivals in CPU benchmarks are all within 0.4% of the Core Ultra 7 155H's average score. The Intel Core i5-14600T matches at 32707 (0% delta), the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 is 0.1% behind, the AMD Ryzen 5 7400F is 0.2% ahead, and the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H leads by 0.4%. This tight grouping means that swapping the CPU for any of these alternatives would likely produce nearly identical frame rates in Control, as the GPU remains the bottleneck. The CPU's 28 W TDP also suggests it can sustain boost clocks without thermal throttling in most laptops, which is important for consistent frame delivery.

The CPU's release date of 2023-12-13 and the game's release in 2019 mean Control does not leverage Meteor Lake-specific features like the neural processing unit or advanced power management. The game's engine is older and likely single-threaded in critical paths, so the 4.80 GHz boost clock is more important than the 16-core count. The data does not indicate any CPU-bound scenarios in the measured FPS, as even at 1080p Low (140 FPS), there is no evidence of the CPU holding back performance—the GPU is still the limiting factor at every resolution and setting tested.