Control PC Performance Review & Optimisation Guide

Graphical Settings Comparison – Low, Medium High and RTX On  

Let’s start by saying that Control looks great in all of its graphical presets, with even low offering gamers a pleasing experience. Yes, higher settings will look better, but Low isn’t without its charms. Control manages to skip hitting every branch on the ugly tree as it falls down to low settings. 

Moving from Low to Medium, we can see shifts in LOD detail, which enables the game to use higher resolution geometry in the near-distance desks. We can also see that Global Reflections have kicked in to give us a better approximation of the game’s reflected lights, making the reflective floor appear brighter.   

We can also see some changes to scene lighting, but these differences are subtle. 

(Low VS Medium)
 

Cranking Control’s graphics to high will see a notable increase in reflection quality, both in the form of higher-end SSR and improved global reflections. Reflections are now much more detailed, but the largest change is in LOD shifts, which sees higher detail models loaded at further distances from the player. 

(Medium VS High)
 

Raytracing On! With Raytracing switched to medium, we can see that all reflective surfaces have now gained real-time raytraced reflections, delivering reflections that are more accurate than SSR while doing do on more surfaces. 

The reflective floor neat the player now perfectly reflects the lighting above and items such at the metal bins, polished metal chairs and other shiny objects now deliver accurate reflections. The addition of raytraced reflections is transformative to Control’s visuals.  

(High VS High with Medium Raytracing)
 

Cranking raytracing to the next level will bring raytraced contact shadows, raytraced diffuse lighting and raytraced debris into play. The first change that we notice is that bounce lighting is added, adding a reddish hue to the desks on top of the red carpet.

Shadows are now cast more realistically over a larger quantity of items, grounding them into the scene in a way that’s impossible without raytracing. The problem with this is that this comes at a considerable performance cost. 
 

(High with Medium Raytracing VS High with High Raytracing)