Upon release, The Callisto Protocol’s performance was one of the main causes of its mixed reviews from players and critics, with most reviews on Steam highlighting the performance issues faced from day one.
While we’re impressed with what we’ve seen throughout the game’s journey to release, according to some sources such as Eurogamer (opens in new tab), these issues have led some players to believe that the Callisto protocol feels almost unplayable on PC due to stuttering regardless of system. For Xbox Series X players, issues are lesser but still noticeable and affect the overall experience with The Callisto Protocol.
One of the main issues is that shaders are not pre-compiled, so you can experience severe frame drops and visual stutters every time something new is shown, regardless of the CPU, but the problem can be even worse on older and less powerful models.
For Xbox Series X, however, the performance issues are a problem, but the bigger gripe is the lack of one feature: ray tracing reflections, which stray from furthering the game’s realism. While all systems offer a choice of performance modes, The Callisto Protocol’s performance on Xbox Series X and PC requires a patch update.
The performance on the PS5 seems to be much better, which may be because, judging by The Callisto Protocol’s credits, over 150 developers from the PlayStation Visual Arts studio helped with the development. This Sony studio focuses on motion capture and cinematics and supports other studios. This may mean that The Callisto Protocol is better optimized on PS5 than on PC and Xbox.
We are aware that some users are experiencing stuttering issues on the PC. We have a patch that will be available in a few hours to improve performance, with some additional updates on the way.December 2, 2022
A day after launch, developer Striking Distance Studios released a patch update to fix several PC performance issues raised by players and promised several additional updates to follow. The hotfix was intended to address and resolve the issues caused by stuttering.
Originally reported by Forbes (opens in new tab), the recent patch has helped with some of the bigger stuttering issues, but there are still frequent micro-stutters that aren’t as significant but take away from the experience. In upcoming updates, Stringking Distance says there will be performance improvements on PC and Xbox Series X, but a timeline for when to expect further updates has yet to be released.