Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios / Kotaku
With the release of The Callisto Protocol today, a consensus among the gaming media is that it’s a decent PC game similar to PS5 Dead Space, but a terrible PC game. The reason is that the game is stuttering severely, even on high-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 “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 with the deadly orange epithet “Mostly Negative” based on over 4,000 player comments.
The problem is, beyond anyone’s specific complaints about the game itself, that it runs like absolute garbage when you run it at the settings your PC should support.
The Callisto protocol launched today on PC with some pretty hefty spec requirements to see it run at its best. While it claims to be able to run graphics cards as low as a GeForce 1060 or Radeon RX 580, when you get to the top end, it’s mind-blowing. For what it oddly calls “Max” configuration (although there is a higher tier), it calls for a Radeon RX 6700XT or a GeForce RTX 2070, running either a Ryzen 7 2700X or an i7-9700. For the “Ultra” level beyond the max, he suggests a platform with a Ryzen 9 3900X or i9-9900K, with a Radeon RX 6900XT or a GeForce RTX 3080. It’s just that the people who can meet those requirements don’t seem to be . get the performance they expected.
My PC, an increasingly modest Ryzen 5 5600X with a GeForce RTX 3070, comfortably meets the “recommended” gaming specs of a Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1070, which would make me think I should be able to enjoy some of the most elegant options. For example, I would expect that there would be some ray tracing action available and that it could reach beyond “Medium” at the default setting. Hey, my computer is almost at “Maximum”; this is not an unreasonable position!
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But shit, it doesn’t. If I turn on any amount of ray tracing or set the basic 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 are immediately upset about their $60.
Image: Striking Distance Studios
The good news is that I’m pretty sure anyone meeting these recommended specs will be able to run the game, if they’re willing to make some fidelity sacrifices.
Now, I absolutely must stress that PC launch days are always a raging bunch, because given the near-infinite permutations of PC hardware, there will always be a sizable contingent of gamers who have found a setup that a developer hasn’t he tried So I have no way of being sure if my (admittedly fairly generic) machine might have gotten lucky here, but I suspect not. More importantly, I have no way of knowing if your configuration is one that will affect a bug until the patches come out. All that being said, try this:
From the main menu (and note: you can’t access most options during gameplay), select Options, then Graphics. At the bottom of the list is Run Benchmark, which will test the game against your computer. Mine, as much as I should have done better, told me it recommended “enable FSR2 performance mode”. Again, it’s Options – Graphics, then Advanced. There, at the top of the list, is “Scale Up”. Mine was set to “Temporal” which I assume prevents the game from time traveling. However, this is what I needed to change, to “AMD FSR 2”.
With that done, I could change the next setting, “FSR 2 Quality Mode,” from the nice-sounding “Quality” to the much more disappointing “Performance.”
With that done, the game was transformed. Now I can play it at a fairly constant 60fps, occasionally dropping to 45 for a couple of choppy seconds when I enter a new area, but then quickly returning to 60fps.
Honestly, it still looks great. I mean, if you’re into grimy, dirty spaceships littered with corpses and mutated viscera. I wasn’t really aware of what I was missing, though I expected better reflections in pools of human blood, and maybe more bristles on the rough faces of the ship’s frenzied crew.
That said, no, this is clearly not good enough. Either the specs were wildly inaccurate or the game is in desperate need of a massive amount of patches. Which is always especially frustrating when there’s a PS5 version that works without any of these issues.
We’ve reached out to Krafton publishers to ask when we might expect a patch.