Control Resonant Launches With Full Path Tracing and DLSS 4.5

Remedy Entertainment's Control Resonant launched on 24 September with the fullest real time rendering package Nvidia has bundled into a single game so far: path tracing, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation running together. Nvidia's own numbers put the combination at up to 320fps at 4K on a GeForce RTX 5090, with the game bundled free with new RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070 hardware.

Path tracing on its own has been available in games for a few years now, but it has always come with a brutal cost to frame rate on anything less than the very top tier of hardware. What Control Resonant is really testing is whether Nvidia's stack of AI upscaling and frame generation tools can make fully path traced lighting feel normal rather than a showcase mode you turn on for screenshots and turn off to actually play.

That question matters beyond gaming. Path traced lighting is the same technique studios use for architectural visualisation and product renders, just running in real time instead of overnight on a render farm. Every improvement Nvidia ships to make path tracing cheap enough to run live in a shooter eventually shows up in the viewport of Unreal, Blender Cycles or V-Ray, because the underlying denoising and reconstruction work is shared across those pipelines.

The trade off worth watching is image quality under heavy frame generation. Multi Frame Generation invents frames the GPU never actually rendered, and the more of a scene is guessed rather than calculated, the more chance there is of ghosting or smearing on fast motion. Nvidia says Dynamic Multi Frame Generation now adjusts how much it generates based on scene complexity rather than applying a flat multiplier, which is the more interesting engineering story here than the headline frame rate.