An unusual situation: it could be called a fan mod, but it’s not, as a developer from the Finnish studio created it!

Even though Control was released almost four years ago, it’s still looking reasonable, especially if you have a ray tracing-capable configuration. There is destructible furniture and a strong contrast between darker and lighter parts, but textures tend to show up late, and if you turn on automatic HDR in Windows, black locations turn dark grey and don’t look as detailed. It is something that Filippo Tarpini, a senior Unreal Engine developer (who works at Remedy, by the way!), is trying to… well, remedy.

Almost six months after Control was released, he started working on the game in his spare time. First, he made resolutions and aspect ratios all available, and now he’s packed it into an HDR ultra-wide DLSS ray tracing patch that will significantly upgrade the game’s visuals. Digital Foundry made a video of it, which we’ve embedded below. Thanks to the native HDR implementation, brighter scenes look less washed out, darker areas look normal, and as higher contrast colors become less noticeable, the experience is improved.

In Tarpini’s patch, the number of rays per pixel of ray tracing has been increased. The resolution of volumetric effects has also been improved, with the texture streaming boosted to make things visible from further away, and fewer pop-ins happen. When playing with DLSS, the film grain effect has been corrected. UI saturation is an option, and there’s also DLAA support, which first appeared in The Elder Scrolls Online (it’s Nvidia’s machine-learning anti-aliasing). DLAA is nicer, it doesn’t hurt performance, but HDR does tank it by 30-40%, so it’s only recommended for more powerful machines.

Tarpini’s patch is currently at version 1.4 due to the update released at the end of April. If everything is maxed out, Digital Foundry says that some puddles will no longer have ray tracing reflections in their rendering, so there’s still room for improvement in what is otherwise a total labor of love update.

Source: PCGamer