Following its release, The Callisto Protocol's performance was one of the leading causes of its mixed reviews from players and critics, with most of its reviews on Steam highlighting the performance issues faced from day one.
While we've been impressed by what we have seen in the game's journey to release, according to some sources, such as Eurogamer, these issues have led some players to believe that The Callisto Protocol feels almost unplayable on PC due to stuttering regardless of the system. For Xbox Series X Players, issues are to a smaller extent but still noticeable and affect the general experience with The Callisto Protocol.
One of the key problems is that shaders aren't precompiled, ensuring each time something new is shown, you may experience severe frame drops and visual stutter regardless of 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 grip is the lack of one feature: ray-tracing reflections, which strays from pushing forward the realism of the game. Although all systems offer a choice of performance modes, The Callisto Protocol’s performance on Xbox Series X and PC needs a patch update.
Performance on the PS5 seems to be much better, which may be because, judging by The Callisto Protocol's credits, more than 150 developers from PlayStation Visual Arts studio helped with development. This Sony studio focuses on motion capture and cinematics and supports other studios. This may mean The Callisto Protocol is better optimized on PS5 than on PC and Xbox.
We’re aware that some users are experiencing stuttering issues on the PC. We’ve got a patch that will be available in a few hours to improve performance, with a number of additional updates on the way.December 2, 2022
One day after launch, developer Striking Distance Studios released a patch update to resolve several of the performance issues on PC brought forward by players and promised several additional updates to follow. The hotfix was intended to target and fix the problems caused by stutter.
Originally reported by Forbes, the recent patch has helped with some of the more major 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 improvements to performance on PC and Xbox Series X, but a timeframe on when to expect further updates is yet to be released.
