Control Resonant runs well on Steam Machine but disappoints on Steam Deck

Control Resonant is a strong character action game that mostly delivers on its Remedy-influenced ambitions, but one significant promise has fallen short: Steam Deck support. Despite previously announced plans to bring the game to Valve's handheld, it requires more GPU power than the device can reliably provide.

The game does technically run on Steam Deck without Proton workarounds, but performance is poor. Even with the Handheld quality preset and FSR upscaling set to Performance mode, a Steam Deck OLED struggles to maintain 30fps. Around the warped streets of New York where most of the game takes place, framerates typically drop into the low-to-mid twenties, with frequent stutters likely caused by the Deck's 16GB of combined RAM and VRAM running low.

Disabling additional graphics options like SSAO and post-processing effects offers minimal improvement, keeping average performance around 25fps outside of certain interior areas and late-game locations. The 105GB install size compounds the problem by consuming significant SSD space. Based on this performance, Steam Deck is not a practical way to play Control Resonant.

The Steam Machine presents a very different story. Valve's more capable stationary device handles the game much more effectively at 1080p with ray tracing disabled. With the Medium quality preset, the Steam Machine achieves a playable 40-50fps in open-world areas, with far fewer stutters. The High preset drops performance to mostly 35-45fps at 1080p, though Quality-level FSR upscaling can be added for results typically between 50fps and 65fps.

The game's graphics settings are highly preset-dependent, with minimal performance gains available from individual tweaks. Lowering lighting and reflection settings yields roughly a 14% performance improvement over the High preset plus FSR Quality, potentially allowing more consistent 60fps performance and occasional peaks above 70fps when the Steam Machine connects to a high-refresh-rate monitor.

Ray tracing is not recommended. Enabling it causes crashes and forces Proton version switches to the Experimental branch. Even when functional at the Low RT preset, framerates collapse into the twenties.

FSR Frame Generation is available and produces visually smooth results without the choppy implementation issues common in other games. It does introduce slight input lag, which matters for the game's timing-sensitive melee combat, so players should test it themselves. The game launched without public SteamOS hardware compatibility ratings just one day before release.