this video is brought to you by the logitech lightspeed wireless range of keyboards mice and headsets the benchmark in wireless gaming performance [Music] remedy's control is being re-released in the form of an ultimate edition for next-gen consoles and is looking to bring some of that performance and ray tracing feature set that we saw on pc in 2019 with it along with access to all the games dlc in 2019 i was really impressed what i saw on pc then so how well does this package on next gen consoles capture my wonder that i had back then in today's video i will be using the pre-release version of control i have access to on playstation 5 to showcase what advantages the playstation 5 version has over the last gen versions including a look into the ray tracing that control uses on console and what advantages it brings we'll look into how the playstation 5 version performs and also how the playstation 5 version stacks up against the pc version in visuals and performance so with that being said let's slowly walk or perhaps even dash into the wonderful worlds of remedy's control ultimate edition on playstation 5. [Applause] back in 2019 when control released i spent my time playing on pc which is important to mention here as my experience was different than those who played it on console at that time especially at launch see from my perspective control was a glimpse into the future of real-time rendering technology and even next generation gameplay without even talking about ray tracing control in 2019 and still today is doing a lot of computationally complex things take the game's destruction system nearly every object in control is physicalized and can be broken down into its constituent parts or into tiny debris like this typewriter's desk as i shoot it various parts of the desk collapse and fall down in on itself it spawns a lot of particles and the physicalized bits show real constraint and weight as it breaks apart this is just one desk and you have an entire scene of them often enough and your physics manipulation can simultaneously destroy dozens of these desks at the exact same time producing flying bits and particles it's almost so hard to comprehend when it's happening the frame is so dense when you get into combat sections and control the amount of stuff just flying around the scene can be mesmerizing then there were some other rarer rendering features not at all really found too often on last generation consoles like the fluid simulation for the his smoke every time you destroy a hiss enemy an oil slick like fluid would burst from them and is physicalized that means if you objects or enemies traverse through this semi-transparent fluid it displaces out of the way with turbulence creating a dazzling dance of color with waves and without ray tracing the game on console and pc was also using a coarse version of compute traced reflections called signed distant field tracing basically instead of falling back to a cube map when ssr cannot represent a reflection the fallback reflection is done by a trace of sorts into a simplified game scene so even when ssr is not working like you see in this puddle here due to the camera angle you can still see a rather convincing and accurate version of the static game scene being represented in that reflection altogether this really advanced tech was not something we saw too often on last gen consoles and its advanced next-gen like nature beared out in the performance and resolution that the game ran at on those consoles on playstation 4 pro for example which i'm using as my comparison version for this video control ran at 1080p this console usually ran last gen games at 1440p or even checkerboard at 1800p or 4k so all those real-time lighting effects and destruction were definitely taking their toll on those last gen consoles and it was not always a stable 30 fps when you'd get into the thick of it especially on the base machines on playstation 4 pro for example the frame rate has a tendency to have a sudden stutter lurch at times in combat or even when just running around the level when this happens it is glaringly obvious and not exactly enjoyable it's almost like blinking for a split second in gameplay the playstation 5 conversely without ray chasing runs the game at 1440p targeting 60fps without any of these stutter lurches at all that's 1. 8 times the resolution of playstation 4 pro and 2 times the frame rate in practice this change is monumental and key as the game looks and feels so much more fluid and better to play at this higher resolution with greater visual response control is an action-packed game and requires some rather fast inputs as you swing the camera around to target enemies coming from behind this is so much more enjoyable and visually coherent at 60 fps the performance and resolution of course are not the only larger differences the last gen versions of this game like on the ps4 pro suffered from cpu related issues for loading and streaming so it was rather common to run around the game or load up an area and have to wait a long time for textures to load in to video memory sometimes you could wait and wait and nearly a minute could go by and then it would just pop in this of course does not happen at all in this manner on playstation 5.
in a similar vein loading was quite arduous on last gen consoles take the first load into the game on playstation 5 this takes a little bit more than 5 seconds on playstation 4 pro it takes nearly 7 times longer at 36 seconds this downtime was most keenly felt when you would die in this game here in this area in the atrium on ps4 pro and ps5 i made sure i died at the exact same map location the load back from death took just under 10 seconds on playstation 5 and 31 seconds on playstation 4 professional so quite the difference speed is not the only thing and graphics are a big part of this and i would be remiss if i did not talk about ray tracing as so far i've really only talked about the performance mode available on playstation 5. the quality mode next to this which can be toggled at any time in real time adds real-time ray tracing and institutes a frame rate cap of 30 at that same 1440p here the game is then furnished with raytraced reflections on opaque surfaces like marbles and metals or anything that's remotely shiny as well as transparent reflections for glass now i've talked at length and extolled the wonderful virtues of real-time ray chasing for reflections in many videos in the past but here are some highlights from control on playstation 5 that i just find awesome take this coffee pot here on the desk of the motel without raytracing it looks fine but the shading of the glass in that coffee pot is informed by a rather rudimentary approximation without ray tracing it almost looks like it's glowing a bit and it's not properly darkening turn on ray tracing and that transforms the realism of the glass material significantly no longer does it look like it's glowing and the fidelity of the reflection on it is high high enough where if you look at it closely you can see jesse reflected in the glass and even the text of the newspaper on the desk nearby this applies to all glass surfaces in the game from the small to the very large and greatly enhances the game's visual realism for non-transparent opaque objects like metal or marble ray tracing's difference can be rather stark take this unassuming radar dish here without raytracing it looks normal it's metallic looking but also not right it's reflecting its surroundings and itself in a simplified inaccurate manner flip on ray tracing and you see something really cool first the shading on this dish has changed quite a bit giving the metal a more realistic look but if you look you can actually see that the reflection on the surface of the dish is flipped notice how jesse in the reflection is upside down here at the top of the dish much like the convex surface of a spoon which flips reflections upside down this convex dish here is showcasing that exact same effect this is all happening in a video game in a systemic manner for every single object in the game scene there's a lot of subtle realism here that enhances every game view even in the small things like how the rather rough surface of jesse's coat will show off large area light reflections at times with rt on where the normal rasterized view looks more plain and video gamey lacking such reflections but my favorite part of the ray trace reflections on playstation 5 is how they stabilize the image in a third person game it's really common for your character model to get in the way of objects in the distance actually this is happening pretty much all the time with screen space reflections this behavior creates large visible errors in the image as ssr has no idea what's happening in front of the character model so reflections go in and out and are very artifact-y take me swinging this box here with telekinesis without raytraced reflections the large part of the screen underneath the box is showing a white morphing pattern as the ssr is falling back to a less accurate reflection instead of showing the dark reflections in front of this box with rt reflections on in quality mode this is completely negated and the image is much more stable on top of being more realistic so rt is more realistic but as i mentioned there is a 30 fps cap moving over to performance analysis here i won't be giving the full rundown as my colleague tom will be doing that in a separate video that will be published shortly after mine for my play i was using the pre-release version of the game missing the day one patch but from my initial testing the performance behavior should be very very similar so let's start first with ray tracing in quality mode the general rule of this mode on playstation 5 is that 30fps is hit in all those important gameplay moments without wavering in combat scenarios which would cause last gen consoles to crumble and maybe stutter the fps and frame timeline is generally completely flat on playstation 5. this fight in the research atrium for example was really tough on last gen consoles and here with rt on there's scarcely a problem now that does not mean it is 100 30 fps all the time as there can be moments like in cutscenes where performance may drop just a tiny bit or when a particularly large particle effect gets close to the camera these were not too common at all though and 30 fps is generally well maintained the performance mode at 60fps has a slightly different profile it lacks drops in those areas where i might have seen them in the graphics mode and seems to have a higher headroom for shading intensive areas like the corridor of doom that area only drops at its worst to around 57 or 58 fps one difference to the 30 fps mode was that the particle effects or effects bursts near the camera would more consistently lower fps in comparison this can mean momentary drops to the low or middle 50s at its worst even though this can consistently happen i did not think this overly negatively affected my play of the game at all and i find this 60 fps mode really excellent and generally very stable my colleague tom will cover these modes with even more detail and depth and with comparisons to xbox series consoles in his video that will come out after this one in comparison to last gen versions of this game the ultimate edition of control on playstation 5 is excellent it looks better either due to resolution or frame rate and its ray tracing mode at 30fps offers a compelling visual upgrade that i really enjoy so how does the playstation 5 version of this ultimate edition stack up to the pc version in visuals and performance the pc version is very heavy to run so what sacrifices did they make to get this game running now usually here i would run the game on pc and turn on and off settings trying to get a close approximation to pc settings that the console is running i did that here but just as i was finishing up that work i got a lovely email from remedy and a forwarded message from their lead engineer disclosing the exact pc settings in a config file as well as the explanations for some differences so here are the settings for control ultimate edition on pc for rasterize settings a lot of the things are set to low as you can see and for ray tracing transparent reflections are on and normal opaque reflections are on there are two custom settings in here the first is in the ray tracing the ray tracing on playstation 5 runs at a checkerboarded resolution whereas it is full resolution on pc and cannot be lowered further downward in practice this is not always easy to see but it in general means you'll see less detail in reflections like here on the polished desk surface where the wires from this basket are thin and probably do not align well to the checkerboard resolution and disappear mostly from the reflection in movement it'll just mean that there's more fuzz or aliasing in the reflections on playstation 5 than one might encounter on the pc version at the same res the playstation 5 version also changes the distance at which rays can travel from rougher opaque surfaces so here in this shot you can firstly see the lower resolution that the checkerboarding produces with the spotted look on the dark catwalk and on the right hand side of the catwalk there are reflections present on the rougher materials here on pc that are not present on a playstation 5.
so yes these rt reflections are lower resolution on a playstation 5 but they are honestly higher resolution than a number of other ps5 games we've seen with rt reflections the other custom setting here is the level of detailed distance which works differently under the new engine version found on playstation 5 and this engine version is not being backported to pc as far as i understand it but on average and in practice i have actually found that the new lod sorting scheme here on playstation 5 more often produces results lower than pcs low so here in this scene where this coffee cup on the ground is missing on playstation 5 but is present on pcs low and above or how you can see looking at the plants in the background how they are more edgy and less rounded on playstation 5 than they are on pcs low or above or in that same scene how the lights above decimate into lower polygon versions closer to the camera on playstation 5 than pcs low so the circular lights are less rounded on playstation 5 on average than you would see on pc's low you can see this consistently when you do the comparisons when playing the playstation 5 version this generally just means that you're going to see more of the scattered objects across the game screen popping into existence or being of a lower quality than you might see on pc in side by sides you definitely see the differences like for volumetric lighting which is aliased and a bit poppy on the low setting found on ps5 or the fact that there's missing raytraced contact shadows which can help a lot of this game's really high polygon geometry look really good or there's the lack of raytraced bounce lighting causing the color of dynamic objects to bounce around the scene but in isolation all of the visuals are in fact intact more or less the playstation 5 is just using lower sample counts and quality so that it has performance headroom so the frame rate does not dip at the high resolution of 1440p and this is something that was shown in my performance analysis as the playstation 5 performs really well in this game but enough about visuals here there is another aspect that is interesting and that is loading as the ultimate edition on console gives us a unique comparison to pc hardware loading that same content using a 10900k and a 3. 5 gigabyte per second nvme ssd the initial load of the game was 7 seconds versus the 5 on playstation 5. and my death test in the atrium was around 11 and a half seconds on pc with this configuration versus 10 on the playstation 5.
so this new version of control is definitely leveraging the next gen console ssds really well getting to the end of my video here i think the answers laid out by the data are really clear control looks the best it has ever looked on console and it plays the best it has ever there as well 60 fps gameplay is sublime and ray tracing support is greatly appreciated as well as those new loading times in comparison to pc we do see some trends found in other titles being confirmed here in control on playstation 5.
