Review Control Resonant: An Impressive PC Version With Superb Scalability

Control Resonant marks a major shift for Remedy and the Northlight engine, moving into a broader urban setting while leaning heavily on lighting, destruction, and physics-driven spectacle. The console versions acquitted themselves well enough from a technical perspective, but we were really looking forward to the PC version.

Firstly, Remedy gives the platform the love it deserves and the engine's technical ambition scales impressively. Even without hardware ray tracing, Northlight employs sophisticated indirect lighting and software-traced reflections, while full ray-traced and path-traced setups push visual fidelity much further at a significant performance cost - but the point is that from mainstream gaming PCs upwards, you should be able to enjoy an excellent, mostly stutter-free experience.

In terms of the options available, there are improvements over Alan Wake 2 - but there's still scope for improvement. The spartan menu system is refreshed with visual previews for the various quality levels for each setting, along with descriptions. However, it still lacks dedicated CPU, GPU, and VRAM impact indicators, and misses the option to completely hide the UI during adjustments, allowing you to assess the settings and performance changes in real-time.

Machine learning-based features are extensive for Nvidia with DLSS 4.5 super resolution and Ray Reconstruction available, along with a legacy CNN DLSS option. We'd recommend using the Nvidia App to ignore those upscaling options in favour of DLSS Preset K for a welcome performance boost and little visual impact vs DLSS 4.5.

The good news is that AMD FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation is included, though unfortunately there is no support for AMD's Ray Regeneration. Meanwhile, users of Intel's XeSS technologies (which work on any GPU) are in for a disappointment, with no support for upscaling or frame generation. Anti-lag implementations also require attention, as Nvidia Reflex appears to engage only alongside frame generation. This means that in heavy scenarios, frame generation actually delivers lower latency than no frame generation. A Reflex toggle is required along with support for AMD and Intel anti-lag solutions.

Shader compilation is handled cleanly without lengthy pre-loads or severe compilation stutter during play, though occasional streaming hitches remain. On the CPU front, processors in the Ryzen 5 5600 class can dip below 60fps with noticeable frame-time instability during heavy, open-area combat with ray tracing enabled. For mainstream CPUs, sticking to the non-ray-traced path provides a far more consistent 60fps+ experience.

Now let's move onto optimised settings and we've got a lot to share here. Essentially, these are our preferred solutions for mainstream PCs with 8GB GPUs, before moving onto settings best for higher end kit. For those interested in how Remedy itself picks and chooses its rendering choices, we've also included PS5 quality and performance mode selections - or as close as we could get to them.

Moving on to the higher-end rendering options, path tracing represents a much heavier workload, yet key settings allow substantial performance recovery. Using RT optimized settings alongside aggressive upscaling enables path-traced frame rates reliably above 60fps at 4K on GPUs like the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super, even in the game's most demanding scenes prior to frame generation.

We are using ultra performance mode upscaling profiles here, but for those targeting 1440p, you should get even higher frame-rates with less aggressive upscaling. And on the Nvidia side at least, don't be afraid of using frame generation. As things stand, with no anti-lag solution active when frame generation is inactive, turning it on offers up better latency and obviously a higher frame-rate.

In summary, Control Resonant continues Northlight's tradition of high technical ambition and there is meaningful scalability here. It's not without its issues (and to be fair, it's not as if relatively straightforward patches couldn't fix them) but in a world where so many titles launch with so many issues - particularly on PC - this game delivers and as such, we highly recommend it.