A stealth upgrade for Control on PC dramatically improves its visuals

Remedy’s Control has always been a special game for Digital Foundry. Originally released in 2019, the PC version in particular wowed us with its slick destruction physics and groundbreaking ray tracing implementation. The studio has since moved onto new projects like Alan Wake 2, but remarkably one of the developers – Filippo Tarpini – has continued to refine the PC version of the game, adding an excellent implementation of HDR sorely missed in the original release (and the Ultimate Edition upgrade) along with a range of other improvements, including improved fidelity to the already excellent RT, improved texture streaming and a more fully featured DLSS implementation.

The HDR upgrade is the most game-changing improvement, added because Tarpini is such a big fan of the feature. Control always featured a contrast-heavy vidual design, and HDR gives greater local brightness and contrast, rich colour tones without banding errors – and even extra detail resolved owing to the greater dynamic range, along with less blown-out bloom effects. I won’t waste too many more words describing this improvement, because we’ve put together a video captured and mastered in HDR to show the improvement. If you’re watching on a standard, non-HDR display, you’ll get a tonemapped presentation – but what surprised me is that the difference can still be seen to a certain degree.

Beyond just showing comparisons of the differences offered by native HDR, I want to comment subjectively how it amps up the game’s visuals. Given how many striking scenes there are with great colour and darkness contrast, it is nice to have HDR preserving that local variation in the scene, so it does not look as monochrome as it did before. I vastly prefer the HDR look to the ‘raised grey’ aesthetic you might be used to, but for those who prefer the original look, Tarpini has even included this an option in the modded version of the game. So you get HDR’s brightness, but with the more monochrome look from the original release. There are other tweakables to play with too, including the ability to tweak the brightness of UI elements – which may resolve with a piercing intensity otherwise.