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Control can be a stunning visual showpiece with impressive physics, but its performance may leave you frustrated depending on where you choose to play it.
The game comes to life when played on higher-end gaming PCs with Nvidia’s RTX-tier cards that enable ray tracing while keeping the frame rate high, but the different console options don’t fare nearly as well. Both the base models of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One struggle to keep a playable frame rate during complex battle scenes, or moments when there are many objects in the air.
“Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can see prolonged frame-rate drops in sustained combat, dropping all the way down to 10 frames per second at its absolute worst,” Digital Foundry’s John Linneman wrote in this detailed breakdown. “Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the PS4 that drops hardest and longest, making it noticeably the least performant version of the game. It ran so poorly that we ran through a range of checks, from rebooting the console completely to running Control on other PS4 units (the fan kicking in hard on a launch model). Nothing helped — this is how the game actually plays and it’s not pretty.”
The base Xbox One model doesn’t do much better, and even the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X run into frame rate problems from time to time. The difference is that frame rate is much steadier, and much higher, on those consoles, making them much easier to play.
You can see some of the issues for yourself by watching Digital Foundry’s video if you’d like to know whether you’d be able to tolerate the performance issues on your system of choice.
The game is technically playable on every system, but the combat can be a real challenge on standard PlayStation 4 systems, and it’s only a little better on Xbox One hardware. You’ll need an Xbox One X, PlayStation 4 Pro, or a strong gaming PC to see what the game can really do, which isn’t a great solution if you’re a player on a budget.
We’ve reached out to Remedy Entertainment to see if we can expect any performance improvements on the console versions of the game, and will update the post if we hear back.
