Control

Control’s benchmark results for the Intel Core Ultra X7 368H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile show a consistent pattern: the combination is capable of smooth gameplay at 1080p and 1440p, but struggles to maintain playable frame rates at 4K. The data indicates that the RTX 5050 Mobile’s 8 GB of GDDR7 memory and 128-bit bus are the primary limiting factors at higher resolutions, while the CPU’s 16 cores provide ample headroom for the game’s physics and logic. Across all tested settings, the sweet spot for this combo is Medium at 1440p, which delivers a balanced 55 FPS average, while 1080p Low achieves the highest raw performance at 103 FPS.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results across Control’s four presets—Low, Medium, High, and Ultra—reveal that Medium offers the best experience for this hardware configuration. At 1920x1080, Medium produces a 73 FPS average with a minimum of 62 FPS and a maximum of 84 FPS, providing a stable frame rate that stays well above the 60 FPS threshold for most of the test. The jump from Low to Medium costs 30 FPS (from 103 to 73), but the visual fidelity improvement is substantial, making the tradeoff worthwhile for most users. At 2560x1440, Medium averages 55 FPS with a minimum of 47 FPS, which is still playable but dips below the ideal 60 FPS mark; this resolution is best suited for gamers who prioritize resolution over absolute smoothness.

High settings at 1080p yield 65 FPS, only 8 FPS lower than Medium, but the gap widens significantly at higher resolutions: 1440p High drops to 49 FPS, and 4K High falls to 33 FPS. Ultra settings are not recommended for any resolution, as they produce 56 FPS at 1080p, 43 FPS at 1440p, and 29 FPS at 4K—the latter two being clearly below playable thresholds for an action-adventure title. The data suggests that Medium is the optimal preset because it maintains a 55 FPS average at 1440p while keeping the minimum above 47 FPS, whereas High and Ultra sacrifice too much performance for marginal visual gains. For a locked 60 FPS experience, 1080p Medium is the only preset that delivers both a high average and a minimum above 60 FPS.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile’s specifications directly explain the observed frame rate behavior. With 8 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 128-bit bus, the GPU delivers 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is adequate for 1080p and 1440p but becomes a bottleneck at 3840x2160. The 4K results—33 FPS at High and 29 FPS at Ultra—indicate that the memory subsystem is overwhelmed by the higher pixel count, as the GPU’s raw compute capabilities (7.680 TFLOPS FP32, 2560 shading units) should theoretically handle the load better than the numbers suggest. The 32 ROPs and 80 TMUs further limit fill-rate-heavy scenes, which is typical for Control’s destructible environments and particle effects.

The GPU’s clock speeds, with a base of 1020 MHz and a boost of 1500 MHz, are modest for a 50-series part, but the 5 nm TSMC process node keeps power consumption at a reasonable 50 W TDP. This power envelope means the RTX 5050 Mobile cannot sustain high clocks under sustained loads, which explains why performance scales poorly from 1080p to 4K—the GPU is thermally and power-limited, not just bandwidth-limited. The 16,900 million transistors on a 149 mm² die (113.4M per mm²) show a dense design, yet the 8 GB VRAM capacity is the hard ceiling: at 4K Ultra, the game likely exceeds this allocation, causing the 29 FPS average. Notably, the GPU’s Geekbench OpenCL score of 84171 and 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 2365 place it in the 83rd percentile of all GPUs, but its nearest rivals—the Quadro M6000 24 GB and RTX 4070 SUPER—are desktop parts with different memory configurations, so the mobile RTX 5050’s performance is more constrained by its laptop-oriented design.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K clearly illustrates where the bottleneck lies. At Medium settings, the RTX 5050 Mobile delivers 73 FPS at 1080p, 55 FPS at 1440p, and 37 FPS at 4K—a drop of 24.7% from 1080p to 1440p, and a further 32.7% from 1440p to 4K. This scaling is steeper than what pure GPU-bound workloads typically show, indicating that the memory bandwidth (384.0 GB/s) is insufficient for 4K, where the pixel count quadruples but the bandwidth only supports a fraction of that increase. Low settings show a similar trend: 103 FPS at 1080p, 78 FPS at 1440p, and 52 FPS at 4K, with the 4K figure being only 50.5% of the 1080p result—a severe degradation that points to VRAM capacity rather than compute as the limiting factor.

High and Ultra settings exhibit even more dramatic scaling. High drops from 65 FPS at 1080p to 49 FPS at 1440p (a 24.6% reduction) and then to 33 FPS at 4K (a 32.7% reduction), while Ultra falls from 56 FPS at 1080p to 43 FPS at 1440p (23.2% down) and to 29 FPS at 4K (32.6% down). The consistent ~33% drop from 1440p to 4K across all settings suggests that the GPU’s 8 GB frame buffer is being saturated at the highest resolution, regardless of preset. The data shows that 1080p is the only resolution where this combo can maintain an average above 56 FPS on any setting, while 1440p is borderline playable on Medium and Low, and 4K is uniformly unplayable—the best 4K result is 52 FPS at Low, which is still below the 60 FPS target for a smooth experience.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the RTX 5050 Mobile delivers its strongest performance. Low settings produce 103 FPS average, the highest of any configuration, while Medium achieves 73 FPS (min 62, max 84), High hits 65 FPS, and Ultra drops to 56 FPS. The 1080p results show a clear hierarchy: each preset step costs roughly 8-30 FPS, with the largest gap between Low and Medium (30 FPS) and the smallest between High and Ultra (9 FPS). This suggests that Medium is the most efficient preset at 1080p, as it provides a 73 FPS average with a minimum above 60 FPS, whereas High and Ultra sacrifice playability for marginal visual gains.

At 2560x1440, the same pattern emerges but with lower absolute numbers. Low averages 78 FPS, Medium 55 FPS (min 47, max 63), High 49 FPS, and Ultra 43 FPS. The gap between Medium and High narrows to 6 FPS, indicating that the GPU’s compute units are becoming the primary constraint. The 1440p Medium result of 55 FPS with a 47 FPS minimum is the best balance of quality and performance at this resolution, but it falls short of the 60 FPS ideal. At 3840x2160, the results are uniformly poor: Low averages 52 FPS, Medium 37 FPS (min 32, max 43), High 33 FPS, and Ultra 29 FPS. The 4K Low setting is the only one that approaches playability, but even it drops below the 60 FPS threshold, and the 29 FPS Ultra result is a slideshow. The data confirms that this combo is a 1080p-to-1440p performer, with 4K being reserved for Low settings and even then offering a suboptimal experience.

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core Ultra X7 368H and RTX 5050 Mobile combination ranks 2983 out of 3720 tested combos in Control, placing it in the bottom 20% of all systems. This low ranking is surprising given the individual component performance—the CPU sits in the 87th percentile of all processors, and the GPU is in the 83rd percentile of all GPUs. The discrepancy between component percentiles and the in-game rank highlights Control’s demanding nature, particularly its reliance on memory bandwidth and VRAM capacity, which the RTX 5050 Mobile’s 8 GB frame buffer and 128-bit bus cannot satisfy. The combo’s rank is likely dragged down by the 4K results, where the GPU’s limitations are most pronounced, pulling the average FPS across all resolutions and settings below what other, more balanced combos achieve.

When compared to the GPU’s nearest rivals, the RTX 5050 Mobile’s average benchmark score of 43268 is nearly identical to the Quadro M6000 24 GB (43262, delta 0%) and the RTX 4070 SUPER (43223, delta 0.1%), but those desktop GPUs have vastly different memory configurations—the Quadro has 24 GB and the RTX 4070 SUPER has 12 GB or more—which would give them an advantage in Control’s high-resolution settings. The RTX 4090 Mobile scores 43667 (delta -0.9%), showing that the 5050 is only 0.9% behind a flagship mobile GPU in synthetic benchmarks, yet the real-world game results are far more divergent due to memory constraints. Similarly, the CPU’s nearest rivals—the Core 7 253PE (40557, delta -0.1%) and Core 5 223PE (40585, delta -0.2%)—have nearly identical average scores, but the Ultra X7 368H’s 16 cores and 5.00 GHz boost clock provide enough headroom for Control’s CPU-bound scenes, so the combo’s rank is almost entirely GPU-limited.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra X7 368H’s 16 cores and 16 threads, combined with a 2.00 GHz base clock and 5.00 GHz boost clock, are more than sufficient for Control’s CPU demands. The processor’s Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 28221 and single-core score of 3984 place it in the 87th percentile of all CPUs, and its nearest rivals—the Core 7 253PE and Core 5 223PE—score within 0.2% of each other, confirming that the Ultra X7 is a top-tier mobile processor. With 18 MB of shared L3 cache and 2.5 MB per-core L2 cache, the CPU can handle Control’s complex physics simulations and AI routines without bottlenecking the GPU, as evidenced by the fact that frame rates scale consistently with resolution changes—a sign that the GPU is the primary constraint.

The CPU’s memory bandwidth of 153.6 GB/s, while lower than the GPU’s 384.0 GB/s, ensures that the processor can feed the RTX 5050 Mobile without stalling. The Panther Lake architecture on a 3 nm process node, with a 25 W TDP, is designed for efficiency, and its PassMark multi-thread score of 32956 and single-thread score of 4005 indicate robust performance across both lightly and heavily threaded workloads. In Control, which is known for its destructible environments and real-time ray tracing options, the CPU’s 16 cores allow for smooth frame pacing even when the GPU is near its limits, particularly at 1080p where the RTX 5050 Mobile can sustain higher frame rates. The data shows no CPU-induced frame dips in any resolution—the minimum FPS figures (62 at 1080p Medium, 47 at 1440p Medium, 32 at 4K Medium) are all proportional to the average FPS, confirming that the CPU never becomes the limiting factor. For users with this combo, the Ultra X7 368H provides all the headroom needed, meaning any performance upgrades would require a GPU with more VRAM and bandwidth rather than a faster processor.