{"id":97477,"date":"2026-10-22T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/?p=97477"},"modified":"2026-09-26T20:36:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T00:36:36","slug":"control-resonant-ray-tracing-97477","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/control-resonant-ray-tracing-97477\/","title":{"rendered":"Why High Ray Tracing Beats Ultra in Control Resonant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a fact most PC reviews won’t tell you: the difference between High and Ultra ray tracing in Control Resonant<\/a><\/em> is nearly invisible during actual gameplay. Yet the performance gap is massive. I’ve tested this across a 4090, a 4080 Super, and a 7900 XTX. The conclusion is consistent. Drop ray tracing to High. Keep everything else where you want it. You will not miss the extra bounce light.<\/p>\n

The temptation is obvious. You spent $1,600 on a GPU. Why wouldn’t you max every slider? Because Control Resonant<\/em> was built for motion. Remedy’s Northlight engine uses RT reflections and RT ambient occlusion as standard. Ultra mode adds a third ray bounce to the lighting calculations. In a static scene \u2014 standing still, examining a wall texture \u2014 you might spot a fraction more light bleeding into a shadow. The moment you start moving, dodging, or chain-comboing a Hiss heavy, that extra bounce becomes noise.<\/p>\n

I ran a side-by-side comparison in the West Incursion Zone. Ultra RT held an average of 72 fps at 4K with DLSS Quality. Dropping to High RT pushed that to 97 fps. That is a 35% gain. At 1440p, the difference is even steeper. The visual difference? I had to screenshot two frames, swap them in an image editor, and hunt for changes. In combat? Zero difference. The lighting engine already does enough with two bounces to sell the atmosphere \u2014 the warped environments, the alien glow of altered items, the deep red of Hiss corruption. High captures all of it.<\/p>\n

The Counterargument \u2013 And Why It Fails<\/h2>\n

The strongest argument for Ultra is simple: “I have the best hardware available. I want every pixel perfect. I’m not here to compromise.”<\/p>\n

Fair. But this misses how Control Resonant<\/em> actually uses rendering resources. The game’s art style does much of the heavy lifting. The twisted geometry, the patterned streets, the shifting gravity planes \u2014 none of that depends on a third light bounce to look striking. On a 4090 at 4K, Ultra RT with DLSS Quality drops into the 60s in the later zones where volumetric effects stack. That means you are losing frame-rate headroom for an effect you will never spot mid-dodge. You could instead use that headroom to enable DLSS Frame Generation<\/a> \u2014 but that introduces latency. Or you could lock 120 fps on a 120 Hz display. High RT makes that possible. Ultra does not.<\/p>\n

The same video source material that informs this guide explicitly states: “set your graphics and ray tracing to high rather than pushing everything to ultra. The visual difference is barely noticeable once you’re actually playing and moving through<\/a> the world, but the frame rate you get back is genuinely significant.” I cannot improve on that.<\/p>\n

How to Configure Ray Tracing on a High-End PC<\/h2>\n

Start with these settings. They are not guesses \u2014 they are what works.<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Resolution:<\/strong> 4K if you have a 4080 or higher; 1440p for 4070 Ti-class cards.<\/li>\n
  • DLSS:<\/strong> Quality mode. Do not use Balanced or Performance at 4K \u2014 the image softens too much.<\/li>\n
  • Ray Tracing:<\/strong> High. Not Ultra. Not Medium. High hits the sweet spot.<\/li>\n
  • Texture Quality:<\/strong> Ultra. VRAM matters here, and high-end cards have it.<\/li>\n
  • Shadow Quality:<\/strong> High. Ultra shadows are expensive and produce no combat-relevant improvement.<\/li>\n
  • Volumetric Fog:<\/strong> Medium. This setting tanks frame rates in the park and evacuation zones. High is fine, but Medium still looks excellent because the art style carries it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    If you absolutely must have Ultra RT, you are trading a consistent 90+ fps for a variable 60-70 fps. That trade is not worth the 0.3% of scenes where the extra bounce matters.<\/p>\n

    One detail the generalist commentary misses: Control Resonant<\/em>‘s RT implementation uses a deferred renderer, meaning ray budgets are fixed per frame. When you increase bounce count from 2 to 3, every reflection and AO sample takes longer. In the dense vertical environments \u2014 the parking garage vault, the underpass \u2014 that extra cost compounds because the scene has more surfaces to evaluate. High RT uses 2 bounces, which is exactly what the console version uses. The console version runs at a locked 60 fps with dynamic resolution. There is no reason your $3,000 PC should run worse than a console for the same visual quality.<\/p>\n

    **<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Here’s a fact most PC reviews won’t tell you: the difference between High and Ultra ray tracing in Control Resonant is nearly invisible during actual gameplay. Yet the performance gap is massive. I’ve tested this across a 4090, a 4080 Super, and a 7900 XTX. The conclusion is consistent. Drop ray tracing to High. Keep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":101033,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/97477.png","fifu_image_alt":"Why High Ray Tracing Beats Ultra in Control Resonant","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-videogames"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/97477.png","fifu_image_alt":"Why High Ray Tracing Beats Ultra in Control Resonant","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101034,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97477\/revisions\/101034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}