With the release of The Callisto Protocol today, a consensus in the gaming media is that it’s a decent PS5 Dead Space-like game, but it’s a terrible PC game. The reason is that the game stutters badly, even on top-end machines. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to stutter, but you do need to turn off some bells and whistles. This morning, Rock Paper Shotgun said 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”. . All of this is reflected on The Callisto Protocol’s Steam page, which currently has the game sporting the deadly orange nickname of “Mostly Negative,” based on over 4,000 player reviews. The thing is, aside from anyone’s specific complaints about the game itself, it runs like absolute garbage when you run it at the settings your PC should happily support. Callisto Protocol launched today on PC with some pretty high spec requirements to see it run at its peak. While it’s supposed to be able to run on graphics cards as low as a GeForce 1060 or Radeon RX 580, when you get to the top, it’s impressive. For what it oddly calls “Max” settings (although there’s a tier above that), it calls for a Radeon RX 6700XT or a GeForce RTX 2070, running either a Ryzen 7 2700X or an i7-9700. For the beyond-the-max “Ultra” tier, he recommends a rig running a Ryzen 9 3900X or i9-9900K, with either a Radeon RX 6900XT or a GeForce RTX 3080. It just seems like people who can meet those requirements are not to get the performance they negotiated. My PC, an increasingly mediocre Ryzen 5 5600X with a GeForce RTX 3070, comfortably meets the Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1070’s “Recommended” gaming specs, which would lead me to assume that I could enjoy some of the most impressive choices. For example, I would expect some ray tracing action to be available and be able to reach beyond “Medium” at the default settings. Hey, my computer is almost hitting “Max” – that’s not an unreasonable position! G/O Media may receive a commission But, it doesn’t. If I enable any amount of ray tracing or set the base specs to “High”, the game runs at a very choppy 12fps. It’s laughably bad, and it’s pretty easy to see why people are immediately upset about their $60. Image: Striking Distance Studios The good news is that I’m sure anyone who meets these Recommended specs will be able to run the game if they’re willing to make some fidelity sacrifices. Now, I must point out that PC release days are always a mass of rage, because given the near-infinite permutations of PC hardware, there will always be a sizable percentage of players who will fall for a setup the developer didn’t test for. So I have no way of knowing for sure if my (admittedly fairly generic) machine might have lucked out here, but I suspect not. More importantly, I have no way of knowing if your setup will have a problem until the patches come out. All that said, try this: In the main menu (and note: you can’t access most options while in-game), select Options, then Graphics. At the bottom of the list is Run Benchmark, which will test the game’s stress against your computer. 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, is “Upgrade.” Mine was set to “Temporal”, which I assume stops the game from time traveling. However, this I had to change, to “AMD FSR 2.” After that, I could change the next setting, “FSR 2 Quality Mode”, from the pleasant sounding “Quality” to the much more disappointing “Performance”. That done, the game was transformed. Now I can play it at a fairly steady 60fps, occasionally dipping to 45 for a few seconds when I enter a new area, but then quickly climbing back up to 60fps. Honestly, it still looks great. I mean, if you’re into bleak, dirty spaceships strewn with mutated corpses and guts. I really didn’t know what I was missing, though I expected it to be better reflections in the pools of human blood and maybe more hair on the rough faces of the ship’s frantic crew. That said, no, of course that’s not good enough. Either the specs were wildly inaccurate, or the game is in desperate need of a massive amount of fixes. Which is always especially disappointing when there’s a PS5 version out there that runs without any of these issues. We’ve reached out to Krafton publishers to ask when we can expect a patch.
