Control Ultimate Edition has received another update from Remedy, and it looks to be an absolute banger, especially for those with a PS5 Pro – and it’s confirmed its place as my game to dedicate myself to and play over the Christmas holidays in a couple of months.
Announced earlier this month, Control Ultimate Edition’s 1.30 patch is pretty clearly aimed at graphical boosts and improvements, and particularly so on PS5 Pro – though improvements also come to Xbox Series X and Series S too, elaborated on in the patch notes.
In brief, there’s a host of improvements added that allow the game to tap into the PS5 Pro’s power and feature set. There’s now a mode to unlock the frame rate totally, for example, and there’s no topping out in Quality or Performance modes now, underlined by the adjacent inclusion of support for VRR and 120Hz displays.
The update also goes whole hog on the PS5 Pro’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) feature, offering smoother edges and enhanced hair and vegetation quality. But it’s not an enforced adoption – you can turn this off and on depending on your preference, and Remedy even helpfully says that: “Using PSSR can slightly impact performance,” so you can turn it off if you don’t like it. Nice.
There are also boosts to reflections, and texture and shadow resolution for the PS5 Pro specifically, and also improvements to SDR, HDR, and TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing), that combine to make the offering on PlayStation 5 a special proposition.
But what does all that look like in practice? Well, you can see the details of the update on the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game in the video below from the brilliant folks at Digital Foundry. And folks, it looks like Control is even more of a certified modern classic now.
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The biggest takeaway from the Digital Foundry video above is that Control will be playable at 40 frames per second (fps) on PS5 and 60 fps on PS5 Pro with ray tracing when you have the unlocked frame rate, VRR, and are playing on a 120Hz display.
That’s an exquisite proposition. Choosing the graphics mode and being able to have the sweet smoothness of a higher frame rate and the brilliant reflections and lighting of ray tracing, all in the brilliance of Control and the Oldest House, is a mix made in heaven.
And if an impending house move happens soon, then I’ll have upgraded to a new gaming TV in the shape of a Sony X95L too, so I can finally hit all the above requirements on the big screen, too.
I love my Samsung Q6F TV, don’t get me wrong, and I enjoyed playing a whole host of PS4 games on it – like Control when it came out – but I think this 4K 120Hz TV change will very much feel like a console generation jump for me, and I can’t think of a better PS5 game to dive into to enjoy that with.
I’d been umming and ahhing about going back to Control for a long time, since originally playing it in 2020. It’s a gripping game with quality action, and it has a brilliant setting that’s rich in lore and atmosphere, and it’s even a near-perfect length of game to enjoy (and platinum). Now, I have the perfect reason to jump back in.
This recent update and its implementation, and execution, are the ideal reasons to return to the Oldest House, and to replay and re-platinum Control – and it’s going to be a heck of a visual treat over the Christmas holidays for me this year.
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