Control PC DX12 stuttering fix, performance enhancing patches for PC and console inbound

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By all accounts, Control is quite a hit or miss experience in terms of performance depending on which rig or console you happen to be playing. It’s worst for console players, naturally, with frame rate analysis on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles discovering frame rate dips into the 10s. That’s basically unplayable, although PS4 Pro and Xbox One X players obviously benefit from enhanced performance.

It’s not all good news for those with the more expensive consoles though – the PS4 Pro version is locked to 1080p and still suffers occasionally chugs, while the Xbox One X has FPS drops but is the only console version to render at up to 1440p.

Control benchmark performance round-up – Expected FPS from every major graphics card

As for PC players, performance in Control is going to vary significantly depending on the specs of your system. Even GeForce RTX owners have been complaining of frame rate dips and stuttering though, particularly when some of the raytracing features are enabled.

I found performance very stable with a GeForce RTX 2060, Intel Core i7-5820K @ 4.2GHz and 16GB DDR4 RAM, although it would appear some folks on PC are experiencing software-side issues. In particular, Control can stutter when running in DirectX 12 mode but this is largely down to a Windows 10 issue, for which there is now a workaround.

If you are experiencing stuttering in Control’s DX12 mode then you can try the following fix:

First of all, make sure you have the latest WIndows (1903) version installed.

Then,

Open your Windows Search bar Search for and run ‘Exploit Protection’ Click the ‘Program Settings Tab’ Click on ‘+ Add programs to customise’ Navigate to your ‘Control_DX12.exe’ Open its Program Settings Find the ‘Control Flow Guard’ section Check the box marked ‘Override System Settings’ Turn ‘Override System Settings from On to Off and then click ‘Apply’. Voila, Control’s PC DX12 stutter should now be gone.

And, another thing which some users have found annoying is Motion Blur. There’s no toggle for Motion Blur in the PC version which seems a fairly basic oversight. An update planned for mid to late September will add an On/Off toggle for both Motion Blur and Film Grain.

Control PC performance report and GPU benchmarks – One of the best looking games ever

So that’s PC players taken care of, although console early adopters are left up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle. Impressions paint Control’s console performance as game-ruining, particularly on those base consoles. It’s a shame Remedy has let Control ship in a state such as this but we’ll assume it was publisher pressure from 505 Games which was primarily to blame.

“Right now, the team are looking at possible ways of improving console optimization in Control, but as you can hopefully understand, these things do take time and don’t happen at the press of a button (as much as we wish they did). We are also examining specific issues that some players have been experiencing and looking for fixes on those. When we have more info, we will be sure to let you know across our community channels,” wrote publisher 505 Games in a statement.

Now, there’s no way they weren’t aware of these issues before launch so saying ‘these things don’t happen at the push of a button’ is a tad misleading. They chose to ship Control when they did, in the condition it’s in. For console players though, there are no easy fixes or workarounds. All that can be done now is to wait around for a planned performance update.

And, finally, a quick word from 505 Games on the lack of HDR support in Control. This was an active decision fairly early on in the development of Control, prioritising resources to other areas instead. One of these priorities is a free ‘Photo Mode’, which sounds like a complete waste of time next to HDR support but there we go.

“Early on in Control’s development, it was decided that HDR would not be implemented in-game”, writes 505 Games. “This is a decision based on the fact that development resources are limited, and we need to allocate what we have in a certain way. Moving into post launch, we prefer to use the resources we have to focus on future free content for Control like the Photo Mode. We realize this may disappoint some players, but we hope the additions we plan to bring to Control more than make up for the absence of HDR.”

Control is out now on PC via the Epic Games Store, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.