CONTROL Resonant

This quick guide covers optimizing CONTROL Resonant for the best performance. I benchmarked each setting in depth, and the graphics options below generally run from most impactful to least impactful, with related settings grouped together.

Graphics Preset

To start off, Graphics Preset. It’s at the top to keep things clean and easy, even though Render Resolution and Ray Tracing Preset have much bigger performance impacts. Here’s a comparison anyway.

Throughout general gameplay, the game looks fantastic no matter which preset you choose, except for Handheld, where a lot of screen space effects are disabled entirely.

Render Resolution

Render Resolution is essentially the upscaling quality. In-game, you’ll see options such as native, Quality, Balanced, and Performance, as you’d expect.

There is no option to turn off anti-aliasing completely. It’s either FSR, DLSS, or DLSS Legacy, with DLSS and DLSS Legacy using different models.

Unless you’re running top-of-the-range hardware, choose Quality and forget about it, or maybe Balanced if you’re playing at 2K or 4K.

Upscaler

Upscaler allows you to choose between FSR, DLSS Legacy, and DLSS. For the most part, you shouldn’t notice too much of a performance difference. DLSS Legacy is chosen automatically for cards before the RTX 40 series, but on newer cards, I’d expect performance to be about the same across these options.

I do notice quite a bit of shimmering and aliasing with both FSR and DLSS Legacy that doesn’t appear with DLSS.

If DLSS works well for you, pick that.

Ray Tracing Preset

Ray tracing doesn’t seem to be enabled by default with any of the graphics presets, which is good to see, as it will slash your FPS on most systems. From Off to On, there’s a huge drop, followed by further drops as you move up through the settings. I wouldn’t recommend enabling it unless you’re comfortably above 100 FPS. If you do enable it, I’d aim to stay at or above your monitor’s refresh rate.

It’s a subtle effect, and the game looks fantastic with it turned off anyway.

Ray Tracing Options

I’ve moved this section up a little. Some of these settings have far less impact than their position would suggest, but it makes the most sense to place them immediately after Ray Tracing Preset.

When ray tracing is enabled, these options take effect.

These ray tracing options have small but noticeable visual impacts, with the biggest differences between Off and any of the enabled settings. For most of them, the lowest and highest enabled settings look very close, while the difference between Off and the lowest enabled setting is much more noticeable. If you’re playing with ray tracing, you’re not necessarily chasing the highest FPS, so make your choice based on the comparisons shown.

Indirect Lighting

Indirect Lighting adds a lot of detail to building windows in particular, but it also affects lighting throughout the scene. The difference is most noticeable between Medium and Off; between Medium and Ultra, there’s not much difference.

Transparency

Transparency is most noticeable on car windscreens and windows. It lets you see into vehicles more easily in darker areas, with lighting that looks closer to what you’d expect in a real-world scene.

Direct Lighting

Direct Lighting seems to add a lot of depth to the scene, especially around small indents and bumps on buildings and other scenery. Look at the metal protruding from the pillar on the left: the extra shadow makes it more noticeable and less flat.

Direct Lighting Denoise

Lowering the denoising quality gives a very small FPS boost. Visually, though, I don’t see any change.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction

DLSS Ray Reconstruction is an NVIDIA-dependent graphics option. I’d usually expect turning it on to give an FPS boost, although my RTX 3080 Ti may not be powerful enough to see the main improvements from it.

Indirect Lighting Denoise

Indirect Lighting Denoise is at the bottom of this section because it has the least impact on visuals and performance at Medium and below.

Volumetric Lighting

Volumetric Lighting has a large performance impact. You can improve performance by dropping it to High, so that’s what I recommend.

Volumetric Spotlight

Like Volumetric Lighting, this is a subtle effect, although slightly more noticeable here. You can see the light changing slightly in the fog, and there’s a small but noticeable performance boost from dropping Ultra to High. That’s where I’d recommend leaving it.

SDF Reflections

When this effect is enabled, there’s barely any difference between High and Medium. Setting it to Off, however, removes a lot of detail from the scene, making surfaces less shiny and well lit. I can’t recommend playing without it enabled.

The Handheld preset disables this by default, which makes the scene look duller. For the small performance cost, I’d set this to Medium.

Shadow Map Resolution

Shadow Map Resolution controls the resolution of shadows on the ground, such as those cast by leaves and trees. Lowering it usually results in more pixelated shadows in other games. Here, though, things look just as good at Medium as they do at Ultra. For the performance boost, I’d choose the lowest option.

Screen Space Reflections

Screen Space Reflections are usually a cheap effect, and that’s the case here too. Like SDF Reflections, I can’t recommend playing with this turned off. Set it to at least Medium, which looks just as good as Ultra in this comparison.

Level of Detail

Level of Detail is hard to spot throughout most general gameplay, and there’s not much of a performance difference here. I’d only expect a bigger difference when your system is starved of VRAM and barely able to run the game as it is. If possible, leave this turned up.

Post-Processing Resolution

Post-Processing Resolution mainly affects cutscenes that aren’t pre-rendered, dialogue, and transitions from exploration into combat. Performance during those scenes doesn’t matter as much as it does during gameplay.

The two options, Render Resolution and Display Resolution, only really differ if you’re not using native-resolution anti-aliasing such as DLAA. Just leave it at Render Resolution and forget about it.

Fog

There’s a lot of fog in this game, and I can’t notice much of a difference in quality between the higher and lower options. I’d recommend Medium.

Texture Resolution

Texture Resolution is usually a freebie to raise, and here it’s no different. As long as you’ve got enough VRAM to keep the higher-quality textures loaded, leave it as high as your system allows.

Motion Blur

Motion Blur is entirely down to preference, and it affects every aspect of gameplay. It can mask micro-stuttering and make the game feel smoother, but some people prefer it off, especially if it causes motion sickness.

Global Illumination

Global Illumination is usually a costly effect when cranked all the way up. Here, though, I didn’t notice much of a difference between the settings during general gameplay, so leaving it turned up is probably fine. Leave this at whatever your preset chose.

Shadow Map Filtering

Shadow Map Filtering is supposed to add extra detail to shadows. The visual difference is subtle, and there’s no noticeable performance difference. Leave it at whatever your preset chose.

Depth of Field

Depth of Field mainly appears during cutscenes that aren’t pre-rendered and during dialogue. I’d recommend leaving it on for some extra character separation. If you like peeking into the background to see details such as writing, you can disable it.

Texture Filtering

Texture Filtering is supposed to give textures a little more depth and quality, and it’s basically a freebie effect. I’d leave it at whatever the preset chose, or perhaps High.

Shadow Map Detail

Shadow Map Detail is a subtle effect. Again, it doesn’t make much difference to FPS.

Film Grain

I couldn’t really see Film Grain during general gameplay or in real-time cutscenes. It was very noticeable in pre-rendered cutscenes, such as parts of the intro, but I didn’t compare those with the setting on and off. Since it doesn’t affect gameplay, choose whichever you prefer.

SSAO

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion has basically no performance cost and adds more depth to the scene. I’d always leave this turned on.

Lens Distortion

Lens Distortion is barely visible in screenshot comparisons; you’ll see more of a change in the in-game graphics options. There’s a slight effect applied much of the time, at least during dialogue and cutscenes. Leave it on; it should be fine.

Vignetting

Finally, Vignetting. There’s no noticeable performance impact. It just makes things look a little moodier by darkening the edges of the screen.