Control Resonant PC Settings Guide: Balanced Performance Tweaks for 60+ FPS

Control Resonant uses Remedy Entertainment’s Northlight engine, which demands significant PC resources due to full path-traced lighting, environmental physics, and real-time effects. While high-end rigs can run Ultra presets with DLSS 4.5 or FSR 4 Frame Generation, mid-range and budget systems require strategic adjustments to maintain stable frame rates without heavy stuttering during intense encounters.

Key High-Impact Settings to Adjust

Ray Tracing, Volumetric Fog & Lighting, Global Illumination, and Screen Space Reflections (SSR) have the largest performance footprint. The guide recommends targeting these first when optimizing for your hardware tier.

GPU Memory and Texture Quality
Texture quality scales with VRAM: 6GB VRAM uses Low, 8GB uses Medium, 10GB uses High, and 12GB+ uses Ultra. Anisotropic Filtering has negligible impact on modern GPUs.

Geometry and Draw Distance
Set Geometry Level to High to prevent visible pop-in without triggering CPU bottlenecks. This controls distance culling and environmental complexity.

Lighting and Atmosphere
Global Illumination at Medium provides noticeable FPS gains while retaining realistic ambient lighting. Volumetric Fog at Medium preserves atmospheric effects (notably during The Park zone and The Subway Fault quest) at a fraction of Ultra’s cost. Volumetric Lighting controls density of spotlights and directional lamps; Ambient Volumetric Fog handles environmental fog density across zones.

Shadows (When Ray Tracing is Off)
Shadow Map Resolution sets sharpness but increases VRAM use. Shadow Edge Softness smooths transitions. Shadow Geometry Preservation prevents distant object pop-in. These settings disable automatically when Ray Tracing is active.

Reflections and Ambient Occlusion
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion adds contact shadowing in corners and crevices. Screen Space Reflections (SSR) calculates real-time reflections on wet surfaces and glass. SDF Reflections at Medium performs as well as higher settings without significant FPS reduction. Both SSR and SSAO disable when Ray Tracing activates.

Ray Tracing Configuration
For RTX GPUs, Ray Tracing Master Toggle enables predefined profiles; Ultra requires DLSS Ray Reconstruction and RTX Mega Geometry support. Direct Lighting simulates direct light, shadows, and single-bounce reflections with manageable cost. Global Illumination enables full path-traced multi-bounce lighting but causes significant FPS drops on mid-range RT-capable hardware. Ray-Traced Reflections and Refractions carry high FPS cost relative to visual gain, especially in reflection-heavy Manhattan during combat. Enable DLSS Ray Reconstruction to replace standard denoisers with AI reconstruction, improving visual clarity and often boosting performance.

Upscaling and Display
Nvidia DLSS suits RTX GPUs; AMD FSR works on all others. Frame Generation at 2x doubles FPS without noticeable input lag; higher presets introduce counterintuitive latency. Post-effects Resolution can match internal render scale (performance-focused) or render at full output resolution; impact is minimal either way. Disable Motion Blur to reduce eye strain and unnecessary blurring during camera pans.

Real-World Performance Baseline

Testing on an Intel i9-14900HX, Nvidia RTX 4080, and 32GB RAM yielded 85–90 FPS average with 1% lows at 65 FPS using these optimized settings. The Northlight engine offers enough flexibility to scale visuals from bare-bones to full ray-traced fidelity, making it suitable for mid-range and high-end systems when configured thoughtfully.