Hello All!!

I had been playing Control on Epic, received the free Ultimate version from GOG, renamed my saves, and continued playing the new expansions night after night with ALL Display settings maxed out. Two nights ago I was playing for a couple hours and then instantly I noticed the graphics looked BAD! Machine & monitor are beyond capable of handling the maxed settings I had been playing on.

All of the settings have remained set as they were all along, 2560X1440 @ 240hz, maxed RTX and textures but it looks like it is near 720p , blocky, Jesses shadow looks like its made out of blocks. I don't want to oversell how bad it looks but it looks like graphics from LONG ago.

I have removed & reinstalled Nvidia drivers, verified all windows settings are as I believe they should be, used the verify option in GOG, and most of the normal trouble shooting steps. This looks like it is only a issue in the GOG version of the game.

Hoping someone here has dealt with, or heard of, something along these lines and could offer some advice.

Thanks in advance for the help & definitely for reading all of my yimmering!

It's not just a GOG version issue. Anyway, I've been messing around a lot with tweaks etc. to fix it. It's definitely a game engine issue since it's streaming textures into your VRAM as you move around. There's a "fix" named "Control - Blurry textures fix" at [url=]https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Control[/url]. It's basically a config file tweak with the following description:

"Mod in more aggressive texture streaming
Applies optional config that increases the texture pool by 1 GB and loads high-resolution textures sooner."

It comes with two different config files, the normal one that force more aggressive texture streaming and increase the texture memory pool to 1GB, the second variant is forcing even more aggressive texture streaming and increase the texture memory pool to 2GB.

I installed it and it got better but it didn't solve the issue 100%. I've experimented a little with the settings to see if I can improve it and I think I have. My current tweakable.xml file that I have in C:\Games\Control\Data\Globaldb\ looks like this:

<tweakables>
<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Max texture load time per update (ms)" value="50.000000"/>
<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Max texture request time per update (ms)" value="5.000000"/>
<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Update Slices" value="1"/>
<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Distance scale" value="0.250000"/>
<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Mip target bias" value="0.500000"/>
<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Min Pool Size MB" value="1024"/>
<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Target texture pool size MB" value="2048"/>
<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Max Dropped Mips (Characters)" value="2"/>
<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Max Dropped Mips (Player)" value="0"/>
<tweakable type="bool" name="LOD: Use ObjectScaleOverride" value="1"/>
<tweakable type="float1" name="LOD: ObjectScaleOverride" value="4.000000"/>
<tweakable type="float1" name="Hierarchy LOD:Distance scale" value="4.000000"/>
</tweakables>

I've found no descriptions about how the values affect the various settings (is higher or lower better?) so I've experimented a little. This seems to work well for me on my 2060. It's not a matter of running out of VRAM since I monitor the VRAM usage with GPU-Z and after a gaming session the max usage of VRAM is around 5.3-5.5 GB.

I hope this post can help someone have a better experience.

Thank you so much for posting this! I'm having this issue on the Standard version + DLC, and the unauthorized patch breaks DLC if you aren't on the Ultimate version. I've tried so many things, and this worked.

I love the game dearly, but having to choose between the broken textures or missing DLC was killing me. You are a hero.