The Callisto Protocol: Another Step Forward for Survival Horror?

Just a few hours have passed since the launch of The Callisto Protocol, the long-awaited successor to the Dead Space series. Critics have, on the whole, given relatively positive reviews. Nevertheless, players seem to be of a different mindset, leaving scathing reviews on Steam, largely attributing their dissatisfaction to poor optimization.

Many players have expressed their unhappiness with the game's performance optimization on Steam, citing significant fluctuations in frame rates, such as plunges from 100 to 20 fps, or consistently subpar performance, with frame rates lingering around 30-40 fps, despite being run on high-end PCs equipped with an RTX 4090 graphics card. The complaint appears to be severe, and it has caused the game to attract negative feedback, with only 22% of the 1133 reviews being positive.

Last week's system requirements for playing The Callisto Protocol have been revised to include the configurations necessary to enable ray tracing. To make the most of this feature, your PC ought to have the capacity to meet the specifications outlined below; however, even the most powerful rigs may experience difficulty performing this task at present.

The causes of poor performance in the game are probably numerous, but according to some members of the Reddit community, there are some aspects that can be improved on one's own. Firstly, there is an issue with ray tracing optimization. Many players have disabled ray tracing, leading to a significant rise in performance.

Additionally, the game uses Denuvo DRM, which puts a strain on the computer while playing due to the extra load. Games such as Dying Light 2 and Doom Eternal have already encountered this problem. Finally, there have been rumors about a problem with the game engine, Unreal Engine 4. It is suggested that compiling shaders in a game of such size can affect performance, yet this has yet to be verified.

At the present time, there is no ideal answer to this difficulty. Users are limited to either reducing visual settings, being patient for a patch, or tolerating the inferior experience on console editions, which apparently have their own frames-per-second issues.

Do you play The Callisto Protocol on a console or a PC? How long do you think it will take the developers to fix these issues? Tell us what you think in the comments below.