Remedy’s Control holds a special place in the collective heart of Digital Foundry. Not only is it one of the best games of 2019, the revised Northlight engine is also an absolute showcase of state-of-the-art rendering technology, which also features one of the best implementations we’ve seen of hardware accelerated ray tracing. Somehow, the developer managed to squeeze the core experience (RT bar) into the next generation hardware, but now owners of the next generation consoles can see Northlight stretch its legs: The controller on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles is a delight .
The basic principles of the update are already out there, courtesy of Remedy PR. There is feature parity between the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X with control rendering at a native resolution of 1440p, with temporal upsampling to 4K. Two modes are offered – an experience limited to 30fps with ray-traced reflections (including transparencies) along with a 60fps performance mode with no RT capabilities. Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S has no RT capabilities, which means a performance mode as standard that renders natively at 900p, with a 1080p output. The dynamic resolution scale is no implemented in this game.
But before we get into the details, I think it’s important to recap because this is a remarkable game. From my perspective, Control was a glimpse into the future of rendering technology – and even next-generation gameplay. Even taking lightning tracking into consideration, Control is doing a lot of things behind the scenes. Consider the system of destruction, where almost all objects can be divided into their constituent parts. In addition, there is the total richness of these objects in any scene – a total shooting with the physical system in full force is an amazing sight. Then there is the fluid rendering simulation for Hiss smoke: when objects or enemies pass through this semitransparent fluid, there is visible turbulence – a dazzling dance of colors with waves.
Everything you need to know about Control Ultimate Edition, with PlayStation 5 as our focus.
And even without RT hardware, Control still uses a form of ray tracing on all systems: signaled distance fields are used to provide coarse but accurate reflections to increase the space effect of the standard screen. Basically, when screen space data is not available, feedback reflections are generated by a kind of trace in a simplified game scene. That said, this is a large amount of technology that is not often seen on high-end consoles, and was born on high-end systems where the PS4 Pro ran at native 1080p, while One X reached its peak at 1440p. In the meantime, there was a feeling that the old Jaguar CPU cores were brought to the breaking point – Control performance improved through patches, but overall consistency was still an issue.
On next generation consoles, the PS5 offers 1.8x the pixel density of the PS4 Pro and does so at twice the frame rate or hardware accelerated ray tracing – a specification compatible with the X Series. There will be a lot of discussion about whether to play with RT or run at 60fps, but Control is an action-packed game and requires some pretty quick inputs at times, so for pure gameplay, the performance mode will be hard to beat. Even so, all modes benefit from extra enhancements and improvements in quality of life – load times are dramatically improved to the point where the PS5 can even transmit data at a touch faster than a Core i9 10900K paired with a 3.5 GB / s NVMe SSD. It is a night and day improvement compared to the next generation consoles.
We will be talking specifically about the performance in a different piece. So far, we’ve only played the PS5 with the first day’s patch, but we took a look at the Xbox Series consoles with gold master code. On PlayStation 5, the 60fps mode is mostly solid, with slowness only manifesting itself in the heavier effects combat, where the screen is filled with exhausting effects work. Meanwhile, the limited 30fps RT mode is consistent, with an adequate frame rate and remains obstinate in its goal for the vast majority of the game with only small deviations. Xbox series consoles are similar, but what looks like an occasional I / O failure seen in the latest generation versions (and also on the PC) is present. We will address this in more detail in a separate section with a more detailed analysis.
But if 60fps is the preferred way to play, Control’s 30fps RT mode is stunning. The RT horsepower on the new consoles is not enough to provide the full range of PC lightning tracking features, but you are getting the best return on investment with RT reflections on opaque surfaces – like marble, metals and anything else. be remotely bright – as well as transparent reflections for glass. I suggest looking at the video at the top of the page for a more detailed analysis of the wonderful advantages that hardware-accelerated ray tracing in real time brings to the table, but basically we’re talking about accuracy, precision and a visual effect. Simply put, the choice of materials in Control environments and objects, not to mention the overall design, is a perfect match for the technology. With nighttime and daytime improvements in environmental details, including intricate details in the smallest objects, the 30fps RT mode is still a brilliant way to play.
My favorite part of the ray-traced reflections on PS5 is how they stabilize the image. In a third-person perspective game, it is very common for your character’s model to obscure a relatively large part of the screen, so reflections from the screen space no longer work properly – the character simply obscures much of the visible area, creating big errors visible in the SSR effects. With RT reflections in quality mode, this is completely negated and the image is much more stable, in addition to being more realistic. The 30fps limit may be too much for some to swallow, and I can only hope that a lower resolution 60fps RT mode will make a difference at some point in the future. The drop to 900p in the S Series for its performance mode is obvious, but it’s a trade-off that I might be willing to make if I could get the RT reflexes back as part of the deal on the most capable consoles.
Overall, I think the Control Ultimate Edition on PlayStation 5 is excellent. Whether you gain RT reflexes at 30fps or run the game at 60fps, you are one step closer to seeing Remedy’s vision delivered at its best – and the update on the latest generation is profound. The only way to improve is through the existing PC game running on cutting edge hardware, preferably with an Nvidia RTX card: you get more ray tracing effects, more accurate rasterization settings and one of the best DLSS AI upscaling implementations from Nvidia, opening the door to 4K 60fps with all RT effects enabled on the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 or better. Lower resolution and less capable RTX cards can still offer a fantastic experience.
Our original Control PC showcase of 2019. Since then, DLSS 2.0 has radically improved image quality to the point where AI upscaling can exceed native rendering.
In the video at the top of this page, you’ll see how the next-generation console versions compare to the PC more directly, although the new console version is based on a revised version of the Northlight engine with two main differences. The first is the implementation of ray tracing, where consoles use a checkered resolution (for reflections only) compared to the native one on the PC. The other custom setting concerns the level of detail distance, which works differently in the new engine version found on the PlayStation 5. In practice, I have found that this new LOD rating is normally having a lesser effect than the lower setting of the PRAÇA. It is worth mentioning that this is a small thing in terms of general presentation.
In the end, Control made a great transition to the next generation machines. It is clearly a major improvement over the latest generation versions of the game – even running on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. The ray tracing effects are beautiful, while playing Control at 60fps takes the game to another level. It’s also nice to see that smart and smooth transformation in the experience offered on all new machines, even the budget-oriented Xbox Series S. Remedy itself mentioned that this is just the beginning of its efforts to embrace the next generation of console hardware and that there is much more to come – and based on what the team has been able to extract from state of the art hardware, the possibilities are water in the mouth. We will be taking a more detailed look at game performance and comparisons on all next generation systems as soon as we can. However, having tried the fully corrected version of the game for PlayStation 5, the idea that this excellent conversion is being distributed for free with PlayStation Plus may well make this one of the best teams we’ve seen from the service.