A couple of weeks ago, Remedy Entertainment shared the official PC system requirements for Control on the game's Epic Games Store page.

　　Those were surprisingly high, but don't fret just yet. As it turns out, they have been updated just yesterday by Remedy. Below you'll find the new requirements.

　　The recommended processor was Intel Core i5-8600K / AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, depending on your hardware vendor of choice, and once again the updated requirement is lower (Intel Core i5-7600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X). The same goes for the recommended graphics card, as the original requirement was Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti / AMD Radeon VII and it's now been lowered to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660/1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580.

　　Even the recommended graphics card for real-time ray tracing is now the GeForce RTX 2060 instead of the original GeForce RTX 2080. As you might recall from our previous coverage, Remedy has worked with NVIDIA to implement the following three ray tracing features in the PC version of Control. According to what the developers told us, it was a fairly straightforward implementation.

　　Ray-Traced Translucent Reflections: Control is the first game to feature ray-traced translucent reflections. Unlike screen space techniques which can only reflect what’s on-screen, ray-traced reflections incorporate the entire scene around the character, and can accurately represent objects outside the camera view, or facing away from the camera. Within the game, the reflections bounce off of opaque materials like brushed metal, but more importantly, off of translucent materials like windows so we can see what is behind the glass too.Ray-Traced Indirect Diffuse Lighting: “Indirect diffuse lighting” means light bouncing between non-glossy surfaces. When this indirect light is taken into account, you get a more realistic image on the screen. Ray-traced indirect diffuse lighting in Control is composed of two parts: for nearby surfaces, we trace a ray to evaluate one bounce of real-time (dynamic) diffuse reflection. If no nearby surfaces are found, we use the ray information instead to sample pre-computed global illumination information at a more optimal location. The end result is that lighting feels more “natural” and objects “sit” better in the scene.Ray-Traced Contact Shadows: A hybrid technique where we trace shadow rays to add accurate shadowing on any surface that is close to the shadow caster. This enhances surface and contact details and fixes problems associated with traditional shadow mapping techniques like aliasing, freckling and disconnected shadows. Further away from the shadow caster, we blend with traditional rasterized soft shadows using shadow mapsBelow you can take a look at the latest GeForce RTX gameplay trailer. Control is coming out on August 27th for PC (Epic Games Store only for now), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so there's not long to wait now for those waiting to play the latest action/adventure game by Remedy.