Control

Control is the game that taught a generation of PC owners what ray tracing was going to cost them. Remedy's supernatural shooter launched in August 2019 as the flagship showcase for NVIDIA's first RTX cards, and seven years later it still earns its place in our benchmark rotation because it refuses to become trivial to run. Across 3,720 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our database, the average system records 84 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 64 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 43 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations reach 440 FPS at 1080p Low; the slowest crawl along at 20 FPS. That 22-fold spread is the story of this page: Control scales from genuinely playable on aging hardware to genuinely punishing on modern flagships, and which Control you get depends entirely on how you configure it.

The Northlight engine: GPU-bound with a physics temper

Control runs on Remedy's Northlight engine, the same technology that later powered Alan Wake 2, and its behavior splits cleanly along the usual axis with one important twist. In static scenes, walking the Brutalist halls of the Oldest House, the game is a straightforward GPU load. Volumetric lighting, screen-space and global reflections, high-resolution shadows, and dense material work all land on the graphics card, and the measured data confirms it: stepping from 1080p Ultra to 1440p Ultra costs about a quarter of your frame rate on average, and stepping to 4K costs roughly half. That is textbook GPU-bound scaling, and it means the graphics card decides your experience in most of the game.

The twist is the physics. Northlight's destruction system is the best in the business, and every telekinesis fight fills the room with debris: chunks of concrete, flying furniture, shattering glass, all simulated and, crucially, all persistent. Thrown objects stay in the world as physical objects for the rest of the encounter. During the heaviest combat, especially in the Ashtray Maze and the larger AWE expansion arenas, the CPU load spikes hard while the GPU is simultaneously being asked to render more particles and effects than at any other point in the game. This is where weak processors reveal themselves in Control, and no graphics slider fully fixes it.

Memory and storage are moderate by 2026 standards. The game wants 16 GB of RAM; 8 GB systems hitch during area transitions as the Oldest House streams in. Fast memory helps the physics side more than most games, so a dual-channel DDR5 kit is worth having rather than a single stick. One hard technical note: Remedy removed the DirectX 11 renderer in a 2021 patch. Control is DX12 only now, which matters if you are resurrecting genuinely old hardware.

1080p: an 84 FPS average hides a wide spread

At 1920x1080 Ultra, the 84 FPS database average means a typical modern gaming PC plays Control comfortably above 60. Read the preset ladder and the picture gets more useful. High averages 97 FPS, Medium 108, and Low 149 across all tested combinations. The jump from Ultra to High buys about 15 percent; dropping all the way to Low buys about 77 percent. The visual cost of High versus Ultra is small in motion, which makes High the obvious target for anyone chasing a 144Hz monitor at 1080p.

Two cautions about the average. First, our 3,720 combinations span seven years of hardware, so a current mid-range card sits well above 84 FPS; the average is dragged down by the GTX 1060-era machines the game was born into. Second, the floor matters: the slowest combos in our data manage just 20 FPS at 1080p Ultra, which is what Control does to entry-level hardware without modern feature support. If you are shopping for the best graphics card for Control at 1080p, any current mid-range GPU clears 60 FPS at Ultra with room to spare, and the money question only starts once you want ray tracing on. RT at 1080p still costs enough that a mid-range card without upscaling will feel it in every reflection-heavy room.

1440p and 4K: where the GPU takes over completely

At 2560x1440 the average falls to 64 FPS at Ultra, with High at 73 and Medium at 82. This is the resolution where Control feels best balanced for modern hardware: a solid upper-mid-range card holds 60 FPS at Ultra natively, and enabling DLSS or FSR upscaling at Quality turns that into high-refresh territory. Our advice for 1440p is simple. Run High or Ultra, turn your vendor's upscaler on, and spend the headroom on ray tracing if your card has the hardware for it, because Control remains one of the few games where RT reflections visibly transform the environment rather than just polishing it.

At 4K Ultra the 43 FPS average tells you native 4K in this game is still a flagship activity. High improves that to 49 FPS, Medium to 56, and Low to 78, but nobody buying a 4K display should be running Control at Low. The realistic 4K recipe is Ultra with upscaling, which puts a current high-end card into smooth 60-plus territory with image quality that holds up well. Without upscaling, native 4K Ultra at a locked 60 demands near-flagship silicon even now, which is remarkable for a 2019 release and says everything about how heavy Northlight's lighting stack is. A 240Hz monitor is wasted on this game at 4K; at 1440p with upscaling and strong hardware, triple-digit frame rates are at least on the table.

Recommended settings: where the frames actually are

Control's settings menu is short, which makes each option heavy. Based on our measured preset gaps, here is the configuration we would start from:

• Global reflections and shadow quality are the expensive raster options. Moving from Ultra to High here is most of the 15 percent gap between those presets, and the in-motion difference is minor.
• Volumetric lighting at Medium rather than High saves a meaningful chunk and only slightly flattens the game's famous god rays.
• SSAO is cheap enough to leave on. Motion blur and film grain are free, so set them to taste; most competitive-minded players disable both.
• Ray tracing is its own decision. The RT presets layer on transparent reflections, opaque reflections, contact shadows, and indirect diffuse lighting. It looks outstanding and it costs accordingly. On anything below an upper-mid-range GPU, leave RT off and enjoy the rasterized game, which still looks better than most 2024 releases. On strong NVIDIA hardware, RT Medium plus DLSS Quality is the sweet spot.
• Upscaling belongs on at 1440p and 4K regardless of card. Control's DLSS implementation is mature and clean, and FSR gives AMD and older NVIDIA owners the same option.

A full Ultra-to-Low drop roughly adds 75 to 80 percent frame rate at every resolution in our data, but the honest recommendation is High with upscaling, which keeps nearly all of the game's visual identity while recovering the biggest cheap chunk of performance.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level: The 20 FPS floor at 1080p Ultra is what the weakest combos in our database produce, so treat that as the warning, not the target. Older quad-cores with a mid-tier older card should run 1080p Low, which averages 149 FPS across all systems, and land somewhere in playable territory. Expect to disable RT entirely and keep an eye on 8 GB RAM hitching. Control is DX12 only, so very old cards without proper DX12 support are simply out.

Mid-range: A modern 6-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a current mid-range GPU is the sensible Control machine. Expect 1080p Ultra comfortably above the 84 FPS average, 1440p High with upscaling at smooth frame rates, and RT available in moderation at 1080p. If you are planning a gaming PC build with this title in the list, this tier is where value peaks.

High-end: Strong 8-core or better CPU, fast dual-channel DDR5, upper-tier GPU. This is 1440p Ultra with RT and upscaling at high-refresh rates, and native 1440p without upscaling well above 60. The ceiling of our data, 440 FPS at 1080p Low, comes from this class of hardware, though in practice you will cap frame rate long before that.

Flagship: Native 4K Ultra sits at 43 FPS on average across all combos, so a flagship card is what buys you 4K Ultra with RT and DLSS at a locked 60-plus. This is also the only tier where Control stops asking you to compromise anywhere in the menu.

Laptop playability

Control is one of the better big-budget games for gaming laptops, with caveats. A modern RTX-class mobile GPU handles 1080p High with DLSS comfortably, and the game's short, room-scale encounters tolerate the frame pacing of mobile hardware better than open-world streaming titles do. The caveats are thermals and ray tracing. Northlight's sustained GPU load pushes laptop cooling hard in long sessions, so a capped frame rate or a slightly lower preset keeps clocks stable and is genuinely the better experience. Mobile RT is viable on newer laptop GPUs with DLSS, but the cost feels heavier than on desktop; we would rather play High with RT off than Medium with RT on in most laptop scenarios. Integrated graphics and thin ultrabooks are out: the DX12-only engine and physics load make this a poor fit for machines without a real GPU.

Streaming and content creation

Control's set pieces make excellent footage, and a streaming setup for it has one non-negotiable rule: use the hardware encoder. The game's combat spikes CPU load exactly when the action is most worth showing, so x264 encoding competes directly with the physics simulation for cores, and the stream stutters in the same moments your gameplay does. NVENC on NVIDIA cards is the obvious pick, and given that Control is an NVIDIA-optimized title, most people running it well already own the encoder. AMF on recent Radeon cards is the equivalent path and produces clean 1080p60 output. A single-PC setup is entirely workable here; just cap your in-game frame rate a notch below your average so the encoder always has headroom. For creators cutting benchmark runs or story highlights afterward, the same GPU class that tops our Control tables doubles as a strong video editing workstation choice, since the NVENC hardware accelerates Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve exports as well.

Common problems and fixes

Stuttering when entering new areas: Asset streaming in the Oldest House. Install on an NVMe SSD rather than a hard drive, enlarge your shader cache in the GPU driver panel, and make sure you are not at the edge of system RAM with a browser full of tabs open.

Big frame drops during telekinesis fights, even at low settings: That is the physics engine on the CPU, and no graphics preset fully removes it. A faster CPU upgrade is the only real fix; capping frame rate smooths the perception in the meantime.

Ray tracing murders performance: Working as designed. Control's RT stack remains one of the heaviest ever shipped. Drop to the Medium RT preset, enable DLSS or FSR, or turn RT off. The rasterized game still looks excellent.

Washed-out or dim HDR: Control's HDR implementation has been criticized since launch. If it looks wrong on your display, play in SDR; the game's contrast grading was authored for it.

The game will not run on a very old card: The DX11 renderer was removed in 2021. Control requires DX12 now, so update Windows and your drivers, and on pre-DX12 hardware there is no workaround.

Upgrade priorities

Control's upgrade order is the traditional one, which makes it unusual among the games in our library. First, the graphics card: the engine is GPU-bound at every resolution above 1080p, and the card decides everything from native frame rate to whether ray tracing is on the table at all. Second, storage: moving the game to an NVMe SSD fixes the traversal stutter that people often misdiagnose as a GPU problem. Third, memory: 16 GB in dual-channel is the target, and faster RAM pays small but real dividends in the physics-heavy fights. Fourth, the CPU, and only if yours is old. A modern 6-core is enough for everything short of chasing triple-digit frame rates through Ashtray Maze debris storms. Buying a new processor to fix Control while a weak GPU sits in the slot is the classic mistake with this game.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What is the best graphics card for Control?

A: For 1080p Ultra, any current mid-range GPU clears 60 FPS with headroom, since our database average of 84 FPS includes years of older hardware. For 4K Ultra with ray tracing, you want a high-end card with strong RT hardware and DLSS or FSR enabled; native 4K Ultra averages just 43 FPS across all tested combos.

Q: Is Control CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Primarily GPU intensive, with unusually heavy CPU spikes during physics-heavy combat. Resolution scaling in our data shows classic GPU-bound behavior: the 84 FPS average at 1080p Ultra falls to 64 at 1440p and 43 at 4K.

Q: Can an older or budget PC run Control?

A: Yes, with settings cut. The 1080p Low preset averages 149 FPS across all tested systems, so modest hardware plays it fine at reduced quality. Hard requirements: DX12 support (the DX11 path was removed in 2021) and ideally 16 GB of RAM.

Q: Does Control support DLSS and FSR?

A: Yes, both, plus NVIDIA Reflex. The upscalers are essentially free performance at 1440p and 4K, and DLSS pairs particularly well with the ray tracing presets.

Q: How demanding is ray tracing in Control?

A: Still among the heaviest RT implementations ever shipped, because it layers multiple effect types: transparent and opaque reflections, contact shadows, and diffuse illumination. Treat RT as a high-end GPU feature and always pair it with upscaling.

Q: Is 16 GB of RAM enough for Control?

A: Yes. The game itself fits comfortably in 16 GB; problems only appear on 8 GB systems, which hitch during area transitions. Dual-channel matters more than raw capacity here because of the physics load.

In short: Control in 2026

Seven years after launch, Control occupies a rare position. It is old enough that a modest modern PC runs it beautifully, yet heavy enough at the top end, native 4K, full RT, that it still humbles expensive hardware. The numbers say it plainly: 84 FPS average at 1080p Ultra, 43 at 4K Ultra, a 440 FPS ceiling on the fastest hardware and a 20 FPS floor on the slowest, across 3,720 tested combinations. Few 2019 games still justify a GPU purchase; this one does, because turning on ray tracing in the Oldest House remains one of the most striking things a new graphics card can do. With Control 2 in development and the co-op spinoff FBC: Firebreak keeping the universe active, the player base keeps returning, and the question we see most often is still the same one: will my PC run it well? The answer is almost certainly yes at 1080p, very likely at 1440p with upscaling, and at 4K only if your card was expensive. That is a remarkably healthy spread for a game this old, and it is why Control stays in our benchmark suite while most of its 2019 peers have aged out.