With the launch of today The Callisto Protocolis a consensus in gaming media that this is a decent PS5 Empty room-like, but a terrible PC game. The reason for this is that the game stutters grimly even on top-end machines. I’m here to tell you it’s not to have to stutter, but you need to turn off some bells and whistles.
This morning, Rock Paper Shotgun said that it could be a fun game “if it ran on PC”, Eurogamer suggested that “PC is almost unplayable” while PC gamer called it “a stuttering nightmare.” This is all reflected The Callisto Protocol‘s Steam pagewhere the game currently has the orange nickname “Mostly Negative” based on over 4,000 player reviews.
The problem, apart from any specific complaints about the game itself, is that it runs like absolute garbage if you run it with settings your PC should be happy to support.
The Callisto Protocol launched today on PC with some pretty high spec requirements to run at its peak. While it purports to run on graphics cards as low as a GeForce 1060 or Radeon RX 580, when you get to the top
My PC, an increasingly humble Ryzen 5 5600X with a GeForce RTX 3070, meets comfortably the “recommended” specifications of the game a Ryzen 5 3600 and a GTX 1070, which leads me to believe I should be able to enjoy some of the fancier options. For example, I would expect a bit of ray tracing action to be available and can go beyond “Medium” on the default settings. Hey, my computer is almost at “Max” – that’s not an unreasonable position!
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But damn it, it doesn’t. When I turn on ray tracing or set the base specs to High, the game runs at a very choppy 12 fps. It’s ridiculously bad and it’s very easy to see why people get upset about their $60 right away.
The good news is that I’m pretty sure everyone meets these recommended specs will be able to run the game if they’re willing to make some loyalty sacrifices.
Now I really have to stress that these are PC launch days always a clusterfuck of rage, because given the near-infinite permutations of PC hardware, there’s always going to be a significant number of gamers who come across a setup that a developer hasn’t tested. So I can’t be sure that my (admittedly fairly generic) machine just got lucky here, but I suspect not. More importantly, I have no way of knowing if your Setup is one that hits a glitch until patches come out. All that said, try this:
From the main menu (and note: you cannot access most options in-game) select Options and then Graphics. At the bottom of the list is Run Benchmark, which stress tests the game with your PC. Mine, no matter how much it should have done better, told me it recommended I “enable FSR2 performance mode”. Again, it’s Options – Graphics and then Advanced. There, at the top of the list, it says “Upscaling”. Mine was set to Temporal, which I think prevents the game from time traveling. However, I had to change this to “AMD FSR 2”.
After that I was able to change the next setting, “FSR 2 Quality Mode”, from the pleasant sounding “Quality” to the much more disappointing “Performance”.
After that, the game changed. I can now play it at a fairly constant 60 fps, occasionally dipping to 45 for a few seconds when entering a new area, but then ramping back up to 60 fps quickly.
Honestly, it still looks pretty good. I mean if you like grim, filthy spaceships splattered with mutant corpses and guts. I really wasn’t aware of what I was missing, although I suspect it was better reflections in the puddles of human blood and perhaps more bristles on the rough faces of the distressed ship’s crew.
That said, no, that’s obviously not good enough. Either the specs were grossly inaccurate, or the game is in desperate need of a bunch of patches. Which is always particularly frustrating when there’s a PS5 version that runs without any of these issues.
We contacted the Krafton publisher to ask when we can expect a patch.