Control Resonant is almost everything I wanted from a Remedy-flavored character action game, including several sub-things that I didn’t initially think it would pull off. However, one particular ambition did not come to fruition: the possibility of me playing it in bed. Despite previously expressed plans for Steam Deck support, alas, Resonant has to render Manhattan a little too paranormally for it to run comfortably on Valve’s handheld.
The larger, beefier steam engine is a different story, which is a good thing, because otherwise this article would be very short. But since Control Resonant has no public SteamOS hardware compatibility assessment just a day before release, consider this a warning: it’s a damn good game, on almost any modern PC that isn’t it a bridge.
What makes this particularly disappointing is that Resonant’s graphics options include a “handheld” quality preset, which – given that a certain SteamOS device is by far the most used portable PC – is something many other games have as shorthand for “Here’s what you should use if you’re on a Steam Deck.” I mean, it is runtechnically, and without any mess from Proton. But when I hit the Handheld preset and add FSR scaling to its Fast Performance mode, my OLED Deck even has a chance of hitting 30fps.
On the distorted streets of New York, where most of Resonant takes place, these settings typically produce frame rates between 25 and 50 percent. Sometimes lower, as there are frequent and significant stutters, I suspect these are due to the Deck lacking its 16GB of combined RAM/VRAM. Ultra Performance scaling isn’t much of a game changer on that front either, and actually makes things worse by tightening up the visuals to the point where it’s hard to tell what’s happening in the fights – and Resonant’s combat, as exciting as it is, only really works if you can tell what’s happening in the fights.
Further investigation reveals a few other graphics options that can be disabled outside of the preset’s remit, including SSAO and any post-processing gubbins (motion blur, etc.). But again, these still can’t get the Deck average above 25fps or so, outside of some interiors and late game areas. In fairness, I’ve seen it hit 45fps in these more favorable conditions, but you’d have to wade through a lot of sub-30fps mud to achieve them. Between that and the 105GB install size that crowds SSDs, I simply can’t recommend the Steam Deck as a way to play.
The steam Machineat least, is a much more competent resonant runner. At 1080p. With all ray tracing bits disabled. Caveats aside, it stutters much, much less (Steam machines also have 16GB of RAM by default, although it’s separate from video memory) and can do 40-50fps playback speed, in those tricky open-world regions, with the quality preset to Medium and a native rez of 1080p.
On the High preset, this mostly falls into the 35-45fps region, although even at 1080p it’s possible to add some FSR scaling to the quality level. The results are less consistent but higher overall, typically between 50fps and 65fps.
This high quality preset/FSR can arguably be used as is on the Steam Machine, although I went through each individual graphics setting to see if any of them would grant big framerate bonuses by lowering them. Or, similarly, if there were Ultra-level settings that could be maintained with minimal performance cost. To this, Control Resonant replied “Yeah, no, buddy” in a heavy Noo Yoik accent. You might be able to create a few extra images here and there by removing the lighting and reflection settings, but be careful, this is one of the most preset settings guides I’ve created in my entire settings guide career.
- Rendering resolution: Quality
- Upscaler: FSR
- Sharpness FSR: 50
- Texture resolution: Ultra
- Texture Filtering: High
- Level of Detail (LOD): High
- Overall Illumination: High
- Volumetric lighting: Medium
- Volumetric spotlight: High
- Fog: High
- Shadow map resolution: high
- Shadow Map Filtering: High
- Shadow Map Detail: High
- Screen space ambient occlusion: Enabled
- Screen Space Reflections (SSR): Average
- Signed Distance Field (SDF) Reflections: Disabled
- Ray tracing preset: Off
- Post-processing resolution: rendering resolution
- Motion Blur: Off
- Depth of field: enabled
- Lens Distortion: On
- Film grain: enabled
- Vignetting: enabled
In short, the best I could do with these was a 14%(ish) performance improvement over just using High Quality and FSR. Although I’d say it’s still worth it, especially if your Steam machine is connected to a fast gaming monitor instead of a 60Hz TV, as I got a few peaks over 70fps with these settings than keeping them all on high. Also anecdotally, I’d say the tricky stuff around town was more likely to stay above 60fps, although I couldn’t entirely avoid drops into the fifties.
I left FSR Frame Generation here, even though it’s really more of an eye-of-the-beholder type of adjustment. I didn’t hate how smooth it looked, unlike many of the sloppy, choppy FSR FG implementations I’ve seen elsewhere, and just enabling it meant Resonant could achieve – in my eyes – 100fps and above. This does add a bit of input lag though, and given how fast and sensitive the timing of the melee bashing is, I ultimately decided not to do it myself. Still, consider giving it a try and seeing how you feel.
Ray tracing, on the other hand, is absolutely not worth trying your luck. The first time I enabled it, it immediately forced the otherwise stable Resonant into a rare crash, and from then on I couldn’t even successfully relaunch in SteamOS without switching Proton builds to the Experimental branch. And even when I turned up the Low RT preset, on top of those tweaked settings, the game’s frame rates plummeted into the twenties. If I wanted to, I would play on the Deck.
