How to improve FPS in Control (PC)
Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019) remains, years later, one of the most demanding stress tests for any PC thanks to the Northlight Engine. It's not just a game with ray tracing: it's THE game Nvidia used to showcase what full ray tracing (reflections, contact shadows, transparent indirect lighting) and DLSS 2.0 meant in the same title. On top of that there's environmental destruction of the brutalist Federal Bureau of Control, with walls, ceilings, and furniture fragmenting in real time with simulated physics, plus Jesse Faden's telekinetic powers hurling debris around the Oldest House.
This is what you'd gain with a NVIDIA RTX 3050
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +80% free FPS.
Ray Tracing: Reflections
It's the most expensive RT setting in the game. In the Oldest House, with its marble floors and glass walls, reflections on Ultra practically double rendering cost compared to Medium. Lowering it to Medium keeps recognizable reflections on key surfaces without the cost of full per-pixel tracing.
Ray Tracing: Contact Shadows
RT contact shadows add micro-shadows between nearby objects and the ground, a detail almost nobody notices during frantic combat against the Hiss.
Ray Tracing: Transparent Indirect Lighting
Controls how light bounces through transparent surfaces. It looks striking in the Bureau's rooms with large glass windows, but it's one of the RT effects that costs the most FPS due to the volume of particles generated by the environment's own destruction.
Destruction Particle Quality
This slider directly affects how many fragments the engine generates and simulates when Jesse destroys walls, ceilings, or furniture with telekinesis. On High, combat scenes with massive destruction generate noticeable frametime drops from the added CPU load.
Volumetric Lighting
Volumetric fog and light shafts in the Bureau's hallways have a disproportionate rendering cost compared to High.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Textures on Ultra consume VRAM aggressively, especially after the updates that added the AWE content. On cards with 4-6GB of VRAM, Ultra can cause visible texture streaming and microstutters.
Ray Tracing: Shadows
RT shadows replace traditional shadow maps and are especially notable in the dynamic lighting of offices and the Federal Bureau. Lowering them to Medium keeps soft, consistent shadows with considerable frametime savings.
Post-Processing (Motion Blur, Film Grain, Chromatic Aberration)
They don't dramatically add FPS, but removing them reduces post-processing shader load and noticeably improves image sharpness.
Ambient Occlusion
Traditional AO on High adds detailed contact shading in corners and small objects, very present in the Bureau's offices packed with furniture.
Screen Space Reflections
When RT reflections are active, traditional SSR is redundant on most surfaces and only adds extra cost with no perceptible visual benefit.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS
+45% FPSControl was literally the reference launch title for DLSS 2.0 in 2020. It remains, years later, one of the cleanest implementations in the catalog: in Quality mode detail reconstruction is practically indistinguishable from native, and in Balanced/Performance the game becomes playable with full ray tracing even on mid-range GPUs like the RTX 3050.
No official FSR/XeSS support
+0% FPSUnlike other, more recent Remedy games (Alan Wake 2), Control never received official FSR or XeSS support from the studio. Unofficial mods exist that swap DLSS for FSR 2 via DLLs, but they aren't official support and their stability varies. On AMD GPUs without DLSS, the only real optimization path is lowering render resolution or the RT sliders.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS on Quality as a first step before touching any RT slider: on RTX 30/40 series the performance jump is bigger than disabling any single ray tracing effect.
- •On RTX 3050/3060, keep RT Reflections at Medium instead of High/Ultra: it's the effect that benefits most from DLSS but still limits FPS even with upscaling active.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers before playing: Control received several RTX-specific performance patches that only pay off with updated drivers.
AMD
- •Without official FSR/XeSS, the most effective way to gain FPS is manually reducing the internal render resolution (90-95%) instead of forcing Ultra on all sliders.
- •Fully disable ray tracing on lower-mid-range RDNA1/RDNA2 cards: RT support on that AMD generation doesn't pay off against traditional rasterization in this engine.
- •Prioritize lowering Volumetric Lighting and Ambient Occlusion before textures: on AMD GPUs, VRAM tends to be less limiting than shader performance in the Oldest House's volumetric scenes.
Sistema
- •Environmental destruction and telekinesis physics depend heavily on a single CPU thread; a CPU with good single-thread performance avoids microstutters in big fights better than adding more cores.
- •Install the game on SSD: high-resolution texture streams and the AWE content's assets cause noticeable pop-in on HDD.
- •Close third-party overlays during long sessions: Control is sensitive to overlay overhead due to its already high VRAM and system memory usage.
5. Known game issues
Hangs and crashes with Ray Tracing active on limited VRAM
On GPUs with 4-6GB of VRAM, enabling ray tracing along with High/Ultra textures can cause crashes or black screens, especially in the AWE sections Remedy added after launch.
Estado: Partially mitigated in patches after the AWE DLC launch (2020), but recurring on 4GB cards
Stutter when destroying large sections of the environment
During combat with a lot of simultaneous destruction, a noticeable frametime spike is common while the engine calculates physics and generates fragments. It's a structural issue of the Northlight Engine, not just a configuration one.
FPS-limited menus and cursor input lag
The game aggressively caps FPS in menus and loading screens, and several players have reported a feeling of input lag on the menu cursor even with high FPS in-game.
6. Frequently asked questions
Is it worth enabling ray tracing in Control with an RTX 3050?▾
Why doesn't Control have FSR or XeSS like other more recent Remedy games?▾
Why do FPS drop so much when I destroy a lot of the environment or use mass telekinesis?▾
Which ray tracing slider should I sacrifice first if I need more FPS?▾
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Calculate FPS for Control →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →