Just when we thought that our coverage of Remedy's Control for next generation consoles was complete, we received a curve ball. Twitter user Another LED pointed out that the game's photo mode also serves to unlock the frame-rate, eliminating the 30 frames per second cap of the graphics mode and opening the door to direct comparisons of ray tracing performance between Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. The results are intriguing, though perhaps somewhat academic.
To put it simply, dipping into Control's photo mode freezes the current game scene and allows you to navigate around with a free camera, letting you pick your best shot at your leisure. No changes are made to the game's rendering settings in the transition from gameplay and those settings are also the same between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. So, basically, unlocking the frame-rate and ensuring that neither of them hits 60 frames per second (which effectively caps performance) opens the door to a benchmark of sorts – a like-for-like, no holds barred look at how Sony and Microsoft's new consoles power through some exceptionally demanding workloads, rendered by one of the most forward-looking and technically impressive engines on the market.
So, what do the results show? On the face of it, the engine is well balanced to deliver a consistent 30 frames per second in the graphics mode for both systems. We can see this by looking at our now infamous PC benchmark sequence: the Corridor of Doom. We're not quite sure why this one is so demanding on system resources, but it's definitely problematic on PC and its challenging characteristics transfer over to the consoles. Series X renders it at 33 frames per second, PlayStation 5 at 32. This fits the narrative we've seen from the majority of the cross-platform titles we've seen to date – that the two machines are very closely matched. More specifically, in the case of Control, if there's still overhead beyond 30fps in this most challenging of areas, that means we should comfortably coast through the vast majority of the game's content locked at the target frame-rate – likely the effect that Remedy intended.
