Thank the creepy fridge gods, Control's PC requirements are now much lighter

Good news for anyone hoping to play Remedy's upcoming telekinetic shooter Control in just a couple of weeks time, as the game's official PC requirements are now a lot lighter than they were a month ago - and yes, I'm aware this is fairly old news by now, but honestly, I've been stuck in a locked room staring at the Bureau's supernatural refrigerator for the past two weeks and I've only just been relieved of said fridge watching duty. Here they are in full:

Unveiled over on Control's website at the beginning of August, your PC should now stand a much better chance of running Control than it did before - especially now you only need either an Nvidia GTX 1060, GTX 1660 or AMD Radeon RX 580 sitting inside your PC instead of a GTX 1080 Ti or Radeon 7. In fact, as the eagle-eyed among you may remember, Control's new 'recommended' requirements are effectively a very similar set of specs to its previous 'minimum' requirements, albeit with a minor bump to its pair of processors.

The minimum PC requirements, meanwhile, are even friendlier for elderly PCs, particularly if you haven't upgraded your system in the last 5-6 years. Once again, though, Remedy fail to mention exactly what kind of performance you can expect to see from either of these spec requirements, so those hoping for a smooth 60fps at 1920x1080 may still find it a bit hard going if your PC only just about meets the minimum set of requirements as opposed to the recommended spec.

Minimum PC requirements:
OS: Windows 7 (64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X
DirectX: DirectX 11

Recommended PC requirements:
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core i5-7500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1300X or better
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD RX 580 or better
Ray tracing GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
DirectX: DirectX 11

Remedy have also revised their recommended graphics card for those hoping to get a bit of ray tracing action going as well, as you now only need an RTX 2060 instead of the ludicrously expensive RTX 2080 to take advantage of the game's fancy pants shadows, reflections and ambient lighting techniques.

This brings Control in line with Metro Exodus' recommended PC requirements, which until now has been the most demanding ray tracing game you can play today. Again, it's not clear exactly what kind of speeds you'll get with the RTX 2060 - although I will absolutely be finding that out as soon as I can closer to launch - but here's hoping its RTX effects won't drop too much of a fridge-sized strain on your old frame rate.

Personally, I'm quite looking forward to playing Control with ray tracing switched on. While some of its RTX effects are still pretty subtle, its reflections and ambient lighting sure do look very pretty and atmospheric when viewed in side-by-side screenshot comparisons (as you can see below).

Naturally, I'll be doing one of my usual jumbo graphics card performance tests closer to the game's release on August 27 to see what today's best graphics cards can really make of Control, but at least now you can put away your wallet for the time being and save those hasty upgrade plans you might have been thinking about for another day. Phew!