I was surprised to see Steam downloading a new 2.4 GB patch to Control Ultimate Edition today, while preparing to do more testing for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Control Ultimate, getting a patch nearly four years after its release — what's going on here? Looking for additional details and information, it turns out this is a relatively sizeable update, adding newer DLSS 3.7 support, ultra settings for both rasterization and ray tracing, and some other extras. (Sorry, AMD and Intel users: no official FSR or XeSS support still!)
The biggest change that jumped out at me was this line: "Added new Ultra ray tracing preset, which gets you more rays per pixel and higher temporal stability." Upon updating and launching, sure enough there are some new settings options. Before, Control topped out with a "High" preset for both the standard rendering as well as ray tracing. Now, there's an "Ultra" preset for each that upgrades several items.
The new ultra settings for the quality preset upgrade the Far Object Detail (LOD), Texture Resolution, Texture Filtering, and Volumetric Lighting one level — previous "high" options are now "ultra," while the former "ultra" texture resolution setting gets bumped to "Max."
For the ray tracing options, the high and ultra presets have all the same items enabled: Ray Traced Reflections, Ray Traced Transparent Reflections, Ray Traced Indirect Diffuse Lighting, Ray Traced Contact Shadows, and Ray Trace Debris. The only difference is a new Ray Tracing Samples Count option, which is set to 1 for the high preset and 3 for the ultra preset, with a maximum value of 8.
What do the ultra graphics options do for image quality and performance? We grabbed three screenshots at the high, ultra, and ultra plus 8 samples settings. Most of the changes are pretty subtle.
What's not subtle is the potential performance hit from the ultra settings. We haven't tested a bunch of different GPUs, but the Radeon RX 9070 XT — which is what we had in our testbed at the time — saw performance drop from 40.2 FPS at the old high settings to 24.3 FPS with the new ultra settings. And if you want to go all the way with eight RT samples, that tanked performance even more and the game ran at 12 FPS. Interestingly, the previous version of Control before these updates ran at 44.1 FPS at high settings, so the update dropped performance by 9%.
But that's just one AMD GPU, right? And this was an Nvidia promoted game at launch, one of the marquee showcases for what RT could do to enhance a game's visuals. Let's go ahead and check out one Nvidia GPU for reference — and to keep things more or less equal, we'll use the new RTX 5070 Ti. (Yes, it's more expensive, and that's if you could even find the cards in stock at MSRP.)
The RTX 5070 Ti managed 47.5 FPS with the previous version of the game running high settings at 4K. With the new version and the same settings, it now gets 46 FPS — 3% slower, which isn't as big of a drop as the AMD card experienced. Bumping to the ultra presets, performance drops to 29 FPS, a 37% decrease and again not quite as painful as AMD's 40% drop. Using 8 RT samples per pixel further reduces performance, this time to 15.6 FPS, slightly better than AMD's drop, though neither GPU is remotely playable at 4K with maxed out settings. Nvidia also has DLSS support, and Quality mode with the ultra presets managed 55.7 FPS.
Image quality does look improved to what I'm used to seeing, both for AMD and Nvidia — and that's at the same high preset. So the slight drop in performance does make sense if the engine is now rendering things better. Maybe that's just my imagination as I don't have apples-to-apples comparisons, but it does seem like there's less flickering on edges with the new version of the game.
There are several missing items from this update, however. First, there's no FSR or XeSS support. I had really hoped Remedy would add support for other upscaling solutions, because while mods can be a stopgap solution, native support would be better. But it's not just AMD and Intel getting short shrift; even though Control now has DLSS 3.7 support for upscaling, there's no frame generation support. And of course now DLSS 4 exists, which can maybe be enabled through an Nvidia App override, but framegen and MFG are still unavailable. (DLSS 4 Transformers ran at 50.3 FPS, so 10% slower than the old CNN model.)
The latest updates won't radically change Control Ultimate, but they're nice to see on a nearly five years old game. There's probably an ulterior motive at play, with rumors swirling of an impending Control 2 announcement. GDC 2025 takes place next week, so maybe we'll hear more then.
