Control Ultimate Edition appears to have been held back on Xbox Series X in order to offer the same experience as that on PlayStation 5.
According to a ray-tracing and photo-mode analysis by Digital Foundry from the weekend, Control Ultimate Edition runs nearly identical on both Xbox Series X and PS5. Xbox Series X however has better hardware in comparison and Remedy Entertainment could have used that as an advantage. The developer did not.
Remedy Entertainment is speculated to have been focusing on releasing the game as soon as possible. That is perhaps why Control Ultimate Edition does not exactly take full advantage of the hardware Xbox Series X houses. The following quote from Digital Foundry explains the apparent console parity but which should not be taken as an intentional act to limit the Xbox Series X console.
I think if I was Microsoft selling Xbox Series X I’d want to see some sort of return on my silicon investment because fundamentally the chip within Series X is larger than PlayStation 5. The memory bandwidth is higher. I suspect that developers just want to kind of get their games out of the door and I think yeah something else which we kind of need to keep in mind is that developers are kind of more interested in people getting the same experience as opposed to really pushing hardware to the absolute limit.
Control Ultimate Edition can often gain a few extra frame-rates on Xbox Series X over PlayStation 5. The core gameplay experience though can be said to be mostly the same, but could have taken more of a boost on Xbox Series X if Remedy Entertainment had wanted to spend resources on optimizations, which is ironic because the game does take advantage of PS5 in one exclusive way.
The file size of Control Ultimate Edition is about 25GB on PS5 while 42GB on Xbox Series X. That is all because of a new PS5 compression technology which nearly cuts the total file size by half.
