Control Unofficial HDR, Ultrawide Patch Version 1.4 Brings HDR And DLSS Improvements And More

A few months back, Filippo Tarpini, a Remedy Entertainment gameplay programmer, released an unofficial Control patch that added, among other things, native HDR support, ultrawide support, and more. Last week, this unofficial patch was updated with plenty of improvements.

The 1.4 update, which can be downloaded by going here, introduces tonemapper improvements which allow for a bigger dynamic range for SDR as well, improved HDR UI blend in, NVIDIA DLSS texture LOD bias based on rendering resolution, film grain enhancements, and more. The update also brings NVIDIA DLSS to version 1.1.11. The full update notes can be found below.

• Tonemapper improvements (SDR should have a bigger dynamic range as well now, by about ~5%, without any loss of detail).
• Improved HDR UI blend in (now its actually tonemapping its background, resulting in an almost identical look to SDR).
• Improved the “Original Look” HDR mode highlights curve (it wasn’t looking as good as it could have).
• Added DLSS texture LOD (mip map) bias based on rendering resolution.
• Fix film grain missing if DLSS was enabled.
• Improve film grain consistency at higher resolutions (e.g. it wasn’t really visible anymore at 4k).
• Re-wrote film grain to be more “realistic”. It should now be even more focused on brighter colors, and scale differently based on the exposure etc… Disable it if unliked.
• Improve vignette look on any non 16:9 resolution.
• Move vignette to happen after TAA to avoid having a detrimental effect on it (this should slightly improve raised blacks in SDR and HDR).
• Added config to disable vignette.
• Improved SDR brightness slider (it’s applied in a more consistent way now).
• Added setting to increase the color buffers size in SDR, to match the HDR ones (this should fix all the remaining banding, especially with DLSS) (this is enabled by default. Note that it will use more memory, and like HDR, it disables the ability to save screenshots from within the photo mode. Use an external app for screenshots).
• Added custom gamma curve for SDR (e.g. set 2.2 gamma instead of sRGB) (only to be used with the SDR increased buffers size setting).
• Updated DLSS dll to 3.1.11 (DLSS should be auto updating but Nvidia official updates take a bit).

Control, which was released back in 2019 on PC and consoles, was only the start of a brand new franchise for Remedy Entertainment, as two more entries in the series are currently in the works. Codenamed Condor and Heron, the two games will take advantage of the unique world introduced in the first entry in the series to offer compelling gameplay, which was already fun in the early phases of development, according to Remedy CEO Tero Virtala.

Control is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One worldwide. You can learn more about the game by checking out Alessio’s review.