Control system requirements – minimum and recommended

What does it take to run Control?

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Control is a third-person action-adventure game where players take on the role of Jesse Faden, the newly appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Control. The FBC is a secretive agency whose role is to unearth, study, and control events and anomalies that defy the laws of reality. With positive reviews across the board, two expansions in the works, and the coveted accolade as one of the first games to make full use of ray tracing tech, Control is well worth investigating.

To begin, we first need to know precisely what components are housed inside your gaming rig. If the task appears a bit too daunting, we’ve compiled a step-by-step guide, which you can check out right here. We suggest trying to hit the recommended requirements if at all possible. If you fall short of the minimum, you may want to consider a targeted upgrade of one or two components. Let’s kick off.

Control Minimum Requirements

• CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350
• RAM: 8 GB
• HDD: 43 GB of storage space
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X
• OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10
• DirectX: Version 11
• Screen Resolution: 720p or better
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection

Control Recommended Requirements

• CPU: Intel Core i5-7600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
• RAM: 16 GB
• HDD: 43 GB of storage space
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660/1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580 / NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (for ray tracing)
• OS: 64-bit Windows 10
• DirectX: DirectX 11 or 12
• Screen Resolution: 1080p or better
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection

Optimal Hardware Suggestions

For a game released half-way through 2019 and the perceived demands that come with such a contemporary release, Control is anything but unreasonable. The minimum specifications are well within the grasp of most gaming PC owners. In terms of performance, they can hit 30 fps with 720p and settings on low. It goes without saying that you can’t expect to enable ray tracing with this setup.

The recommended requirements up the demands, particularly when it comes to the GPU. Nevertheless, a GTX 1660 or 1060 is more or less considered a mid-market card these days and won’t break the bank. The 16 GB of RAM requirement is pretty high, but nothing a simple, and relatively low cost, upgrade can’t fix.

With one of the non-RTX options, you can expect to hit stable 60 fps with a resolution of 1080p and settings on high to ultra. You could use ray tracing, but you need to drop the settings down to medium and be okay with a maximum of 30 fps. Turning the resolution to 720p should improve things by a dozen fps or so.

With an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, you can hit 60 fps with ray tracing enabled quite comfortably. Drop down the settings to medium to blow past 80 fps.

Control Game Details

• Release Date: August 27th, 2019 (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
• System Requirements: Medium
• Genre: Action-adventure
• Developer: Remedy Entertainment
• Publisher: 505 Games

Tasked with infiltrating the agency’s New York base known as the Oldest House, Faden must square up to a nefarious evil known as the Hiss by using esoteric abilities to loosen its corrupting grasp on reality. The Hiss has corrupted FBC agents who appear in both human forms and as mutated aberrations. Jesse’s abilities range from levitation to telekinesis allied to a fully customizable reality-defying gun known as the Service Weapon.

What Gaming PC Do We Recommend?

Control is well-optimized, so the recommended specifications are more than sufficient to get an excellent experience from the game both in terms of fluidity and graphical fidelity. It’s well worth playing the game with ray tracing enabled if you are lucky enough to own an RTX variant.

We recommend our $800 build if you want a push in the right direction. The specifications match up to the recommended requirements, with the only difference being you get a better CPU in the AMD Ryzen 5 3600. You could even supplement the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti for an RTX 2060 to get the most out of Control’s ray tracing features.

Really though, in spite of what these requirements say, if you want a truly fluid FPS experience playing the game on max settings we’d go with either our $1,500 self-build or $1,500 pre-build option, and if you’re looking at 4K gaming, you’ll need at least a $2,000 self build or $2,000 pre-build.

How many GB is Control on PC?

You’ll required to have at least 43 GB of storage to download Control.

If you’re instead wondering about how many GBs of memory you need, you need a minimum of 8GB of RAM to run Control on your PC.

Is Control a demanding game?

Yes and no. If you want to run the game at minimum settings, most budget GPUs will just about keep up. However, if you’re looking to engage Ray Tracing with DLSS, then you’ll want to look at mid-tier GPUs with DLSS.