I am a big fan of Remedy Entertainment. They continue to make groundbreaking games that push narrative and graphics technology to their limits. Remedy’s newest game, Control, is being hailed by some as a modern masterpiece, but not on original Xbox One or PS4 hardware. The game has massive stutters and framerate drops to the low teens, and as low as 10FPS on the PS4. You can watch the whole graphical run down on Digital Foundry:
If you watch the video above, you can see that the game runs ‘okay’ to acceptable on the mid-generation consoles with just small short framerate dips. With the Xbox One X fairing the best, but man it is hard to watch what happens once the analysis gets to the base consoles. I would argue that at that low of a framerate the game is unplayable, and it never should have passed QC.
Based on the order of the framerate going: Xbox One X > PS4 Pro > Xbox One (S) > PS4, I would guess this is a CPU issue. Since the PS4 does have the slowest CPU clock speed out of the bunch. Its faster GPU usually pushes it past the Xbox One, but in this case, there is something else going on that needs some serious CPU horsepower, and while I am ragging on the PS4, Control has a pretty poor showing across the board.
This all leads me to believe that Control is generation too early. People with beefy PCs are quite happy with Control, but people with mid-tier and lower PCs are feeling the pain as well, but that happens in the PC space from time to time, and it is more acceptable there because PC players have an upgrade path if they want to get the most out of Control. Not so much with console players.
If Remedy had waited a year, Control would have come out on machines with modern CPUs and stronger GPUs with a little ray tracing thrown in, and I am sure Control would have looked great in that environment, but as it stands now, it looks like you should skip Control if you didn’t get a mid-generation console, or you have a low spec PC. Otherwise I hear it is quite the game.