Control: Ultimate Edition Confirms PS5 and Xbox Series S/X Dates and Ray Tracing Toggle

Want to watch your super-powered mayhem reflected in some mirror-smooth floors and windows? You’ll be in luck soon if you have a new console—Control: Ultimate Edition for PS5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X now has its release dates locked down.

Folks planning on buying it digitally or who are upgrading for free from the last-gen versions of the Ultimate Edition will be able to take the new features in Remedy’s shooter for a spin on Feb. 2, 2021, hitting the early 2021 window promised with a mid-November delay. Physical copies will make their way to retailers a month later on March 2.

The big improvements that new console owners can expect from this version of Control are two graphical options; one, a Performance Mode, will run the game at 60 frames-per-second while the other, Graphics Mode, will add ray traced reflections and perhaps other, more subtle ray tracing features while halving the frame rate back down to 30. This compromise is not too surprising considering Control emerged in 2019 as a prominent benchmarking game for ray tracing-capable graphics cards on PC and is something of a poster-child for the benefits of DLSS, Nvidia’s proprietary AI-driven upscaling feature.

DLSS is all but required on PC to reach high resolutions and 60 frames per second or more in Control while also enabling ray tracing. Recent tests of AMD’s newest graphics cards, which share the RDNA 2 architecture with all of the new consoles, show them lagging far behind Nvidia in ray tracing performance with Control in part because there’s no equivalent AMD upscaler just yet. Without that kind of tech, we can probably expect games like this and Spider-Man: Miles Morales to keep playing around with multiple performance modes to try and give players choices between smoother gameplay and better visuals.

Control: Ultimate Edition costs $39.99 and includes all the premium DLC Remedy’s released for the game, including this year’s earlier Alan Wake expansion that helped introduce Remedy’s Connected Universe. Players who bought the original release of Control on console are not entitled to a free next-gen upgrade, even if they bought all the DLC. That decision has earned publisher 505 Games some ire, but so far it hasn’t budged on the practice. The Ultimate Edition has already gone on sale a few times, though, so if you never bought the DLC and can pick it up for cheap, you might find it’s worth it to revisit the game with steadier performance and new bells and whistles next year.