Callisto Protocol: BEST PC Settings For Optimization

The Callisto Protocol has launched off to a rocky start as of late and players are constantly facing numerous technical and performance issues, to counteract it, you will need to learn the best settings. There are five different graphical option sections to choose from and each contains different settings that you can choose to alter the core of the game. It is vital that you change these graphical settings as the game is currently dreadful in terms of both Performance and stability on the Day 1 Version.

The Callisto Protocol System Requirements

First things first, you will want to be aware of the system requirements listed by the developers as they help you identify if your PC can run the game or not with its current hardware. It will give you an idea of how demanding the game is for your system and decide what parts you need to run it in a decent graphical setting.

Usually, most games tend to follow a minimum and recommend system requirements but since the game is crafted for the next-gen era, you have four different requirements to follow here. We have also conveniently shared them in the image above which were all provided thanks to the developers at Striking Distance Studios.

Minimum

• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 75 GB available space

If you’re even remotely trying to access or launch the game in order to play it at the lowest possible settings or somewhere along the lines then you will need to make sure your PC meets the minimum requirements.

Recommended

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: Intel® Core i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 75 GB available space
• Additional Notes By Developers: SSD is Recommended for faster loading times

According to the developers, the recommended settings will allow your game to run it smoothly but take it with a grain of salt that due to the current issues we discussed previously, you might run into a fair amount of problems with the recommended specifications despite your PC meeting the requirements listed here.

Max

• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 2700x or Intel Core i7-9700k
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 75 GB available (SSD recommended)

The Max settings are there to provide a stable experience with the game as intended by the developers at a balance between medium to high settings. It allows you to run it at a stable framerate and resolution without losing too much image quality or performance for that matter. If you’re trying to achieve the best settings for The Callisto Protocol then playing the game with the Max requirements in mind is our personal suggestion.

Ultra

• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x or Intel Core i9-9900k
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 75 GB available (SSD recommended)

Lastly, if you are planning to run the game at the highest possible setting available, then we strongly advise following the Ultra requirements, which entail the most high-end PC components on the market. Furthermore, with the passing of time, the developers may release stability updates to ensure you achieve an untroubled gameplay experience while running the game at these requirements.

Best Callisto Protocol Graphics Settings

Now before we proceed with our personal choice of the best settings for the Callisto Protocol, we should advise that the game may get drastically improved as time goes on when the developers release updates to it. Our settings may give the best results for some but not the same for anyone else since our primary focus is to make the game run as smoothly as possible.

The fact is that in a majority of the areas in the game, you will not only experience a large number of framerate drops but you may also run into occasional stutters and other tedious issues too.

Keep in mind that you are bound to run into several problems, at least with the day 1 version of the game on PC. Nonetheless, you can tweak the Graphical settings by heading into Options from the main menu, and selecting ‘Graphics’, after which you will be presented with five different sections here which we are briefly going to discuss in short detail.

General

The General section, unlike most other games, only has a handful of options for you to seamlessly tweak such as the frame limiter. However, it also contains one of the most important settings which has helped numerous people counteract the constant stuttering of the game, the Direct X setting, which we will discuss in a bit here.

Sync Every Frame [V-Sync] – On

The V-sync or ‘Vertical Syncronization’ option has always been preferred to keep enabled unless you’re playing a competitive multiplayer or First-Person Shooter game. Keeping this setting enabled will prevent you from running into screen tearing issues whilst playing the game by capping the framerate to a solid 60FPS which of course, can be annoying to experience if left unchecked.

Framerate Limit – Unlimited

Whilst the V-sync will allow the Graphics Card to render the exact number of frames in a short interval to your display, the framerate limit functions differently. It is advised that you keep the setting on Unlimited as otherwise, Framerate Limit will essentially force the GPU to only output a restricted frame rate which can limit its work power and efficiency to render the game properly.

Direct X Version – 11

Direct X is basically an API from Microsoft whose sole purpose is to function and manage minute-to-minute tasks on your system, most specifically running games and other multimedia components efficiently. Currently, the most used versions of the API include Direct X 10, 11, and 12.

However, in most video games on PC, Direct X 12 is known to cause issues for a large number of gamers which isn’t anything new considering the API Version may run the best in some cases, while in others, worse. So with a game such as The Callisto Protocol, we found that using Direct X 11 was the way to go since Direct X 12 was causing issues and the game generally ran better on the former after a couple of tests from our end.

Display

The Display settings pertain to different options associated with your monitor such as the resolution and brightness, the latter of which comes down to personal preference. The options included in this section do not tend to conflict with your performance too much but it is worth revising them just in case before you dive into the game for the first time.

Fullscreen Mode – Fullscreen

Unless you have a proper reason to run the game whilst in Borderless to manage side tasks, it is advised that you run the game in Fullscreen as it will allow your PC to focus all of its resources on running the game as smoothly as possible. Survival Horror video games such as the Callisto Protocol are best experienced with coherent immersion so running it in Fullscreen will undoubtedly provide that comfort.

Resolution – 1920 x 1080

It is a no-brainer to use the gold standard 1920 x 1080p resolution but in case you might want to squeeze in a little bit more framerate then it is highly advised that you run the game at a lower resolution. It will decrease the image quality but you will surely face a boost in performance so it is up to you if you want to tweak it to your liking or not in Callisto Protocol.

Brightness, HDR & Gamma

HDR is a feature present in specific monitors and televisions and it stands for High Dynamic Range. It allows the user to experience a more vivid and sharp image quality on their display. While a 4k resolution may provide better and more noticeable results, you can enable the HDR feature if your display supports it as it will hardly affect your framerate or tank the performance of the game.

Lastly, Brightness and Gamma should be adjusted by yourself. The Callisto Protocol is littered with dark corners and passageways so be sure to fine-tune these two settings so that you can traverse with ease. If you’re looking for the ultimate horror experience, you can slightly lower them for darker image clarity during gameplay.

Lighting

Now that most of the basic settings are out of the way, we are now transitioning to the true graphical settings here, the first of which is the Lighting section as shown in the image above. This section contains the lighting effects such as the Volumetrics Quality as well as the Ray-tracing properties of the game if your GPU supports it. The settings included here can drastically impact the performance and stability of the game in a few ways.

Lighting Quality – Standard

The Lighting Quality setting will determine the overall quality of the dispersed lighting rays around the environment and on the characters themselves. Unless you’re running a beefy Graphics Card such as the RTX 3060Ti or better, it is advised that you keep this at the bare minimum of the standard option. Anything higher will drastically tank performance and our main focus here, for now, is to provide the optimal optimization for you.

Shadow Quality – Medium

During most cases, the Shadow Quality in video game graphical settings has often been cited as a setting that can drastically impact the performance factor. While that has proven to be true, it becomes mandatory to set this somewhere between medium or low depending on your PC build. The game already has one of the highest graphic fidelity models we’ve ever seen and the last thing you want is the Shadows tanking your performance.

Volumetrics Quality – Medium

The Volumetrics quality will determine the environmental lighting effects, fog and other visual elements during pre-rendered cutscenes as well as during gameplay scenarios.

Keeping the setting at high or ultra can provide a highly immersive experience for horror fans but we found that adjusting it to the medium setting allowed for better performance. If you’re still having trouble with the optimization you can freely adjust this to whatever you wish for your GPU so that it doesn’t impact the framerate.

Particle Quality – Medium

The Particle Quality determines the effects of various effects in animations, most specifically explosions, weapon attacks, splashes, and sprays all falling in line with the particle effects section. During the action-oriented sequences or combat in general, the particle effects can drastically impact the stuttering issues and the performance so until the game becomes stable, we suggest switching this setting towards Medium.

Screen Space Reflections & Physical Refractions – Enabled

We were using a GTX 1060ti in our testing for the game and after a couple of benchmarks, we were able to determine that the Reflections and Physical Refractions can come down to personal preference. This is due to the fact that we hardly noticed any major performance improvements while keeping both settings disabled.

Effects

The visual effects play an integral role in The Callisto Protocol but for your convenience, we have outlined each one and how they may affect your experience. These include important options such as Motion blur and depth of field, so follow as we discuss how each one can impact the gameplay aspect of the game.

Depth Of Field – Disabled

In our personal opinion, Depth of Field is great for when you want a cinematic immersion during gameplay but it can be quite distracting, especially with a game such as The Callisto Protocol. While taking down space monsters, you will want the best possible focus as possible on the environment without it getting blurred so we recommend keeping Depth Of Field Disabled.

Motion Blur – Disabled

As all gamers may already know, Motion Blur is an instant liability, especially if you’re someone who absolutely despises motion sickness in general so unless you want an unnoticeable smoothness to your game, we highly suggest keeping this setting disabled not just for Callisto Protocol but almost any other single-player game too.

Subsurface Scattering – Enabled

Another minor option here in the Effects section is the Subsurface Scattering which hardly affects performance so feel free to keep it enabled in your game. The tool is essentially used to simulate light absorption on models and other surfaces in order to provide a coherent display of lighting during certain scenes and in the environment.

Anti-Aliasing – Temporal AA (TAA)

The most important aspect here is the Anti-Aliasing options which we found the best ones to use was TAA as in comparison to FXAA, it produces a sharper image quality and smoothes out the textures at longer distances but at the same, it is also particularly demanding of your PC. Not to mention, when in motion, the blurriness of objects and models is further reduced to a bare minimum, at least from our testing.

However, we strongly recommend testing out which one suits your preference the most here as FXAA is considered to be the popular choice as it doesn’t tank performance too much but is far more efficient than TAA in terms of rendering an image quality without sacrificing framerate.

Film Grain – Disabled

The Film Grain feature essentially allows you to enable a grainy filter above the display of the game which adds a cinematic effect to the experience. But most gamers tend to keep it off and we agree with that as we’d rather prefer a sharp image quality rather than have it layered with an annoying display filter.

Advanced

Lastly, the advanced graphics settings as depicted in the image above contain the most useful options that you will need to tweak such as the upscaling API as well as the overall Texture altering features. Adjusting these options will provide the best graphical settings for better performance in The Callisto Protocol.

Upscaling – AMD FSR 2

In today’s modern age of gaming, both Nvidia and AMD have cooked up their own upscaling technologies for gamers to use which can greatly help you improve your overall performance in video games. Nvidia has hand-crafted their DLSS upscaling technology which is found within their top-of-the-line RTX Graphics Cards.

Meanwhile, the AMD FSR upscaling can be used with almost any type of GPU as it is considered to improve your performance across the board, and it is generally considered one of the best Rendering APIs for lower-end GPUs. It also boosts your framerate without sacrificing too much of the image quality with the right setting.

In our experience, we enabled AMD FSR 2 and kept the setting on Quality as Balanced and Performance, we found the image quality to be slightly decreased than usual. Nvidia RTX series users can opt to apply the same for their DLSS technology here too but if you don’t mind the slight decrease in image clarity then by all means try switching to either Performance or Balanced and verify if it made a difference for you in optimization.

Mesh Quality – Medium

Various objects and their textures in video games are made up of tons of polygons which combine together to form a mesh quality altogether. By increasing the mesh quality you will be able to receive a higher detailed image of the objects in the environment but at the cost of tanking your performance. If you have a high-end graphics card then by all means you can keep it enabled at the high settings.

Texture Quality – Medium

The following option is pretty self-explanatory as it allows you to adjust the overall detail and clarity of the textures in the game from the models of the characters, to the objects and other elements of the environment. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you should preferably keep this at a medium preference, for now at least.

It is solely due to the fact that the game will receive updates in the future, making it stable and run better so by the time that happens, you may just be able to increase the setting from medium to High.

Texture Filtering Quality – Medium

The texture filtering quality functions a little differently than the overall Texture Quality as it determines how blurry the image is at longer distances in the background and along the sides of the screen. The higher settings may require you to compensate for the performance so we suggest turning to medium preferences.

Benchmark Results

According to a couple of benchmarking tests that we did inside the game as well as by playing the game itself too, we were able to find a sweet spot to receive an average of 40 to 45FPS with these settings. The PC build we tested this on consisted of an Nvidia GTX 1060ti along with an Intel Core i5 8400 but we imagine if you’re playing it anything with better peripherals will grant you a smooth experience along with the occasional hiccups.

Tips To Improve Performance & Reduce Stuttering

There are a couple of known methods that you can apply in order to maximize your performance on the game but keep in mind these may either prove insignificant or provide an unnoticeable boost in optimization.

Wait For Updates

Thanks for your patience. A PC patch is now available to improve gameplay stuttering issues due to shader compilation. After updating, you may see temporary stuttering in the game menu the first time you launch the app. We are working on further optimizations in the days ahead.

— The Callisto Protocol (@CallistoTheGame) December 3, 2022

The developers of the game are well aware of the numerous complaints about the stuttering and Framerate loss issues and are slowly beginning to roll out updates which will undoubtedly help improve the optimization. Furthermore, it is advised that you let the game render the assets upon booting up the campaign for the first time as it will allow it to function properly rather than stuttering every so often in the middle of everything.

It is expected that with the passage of time, the game will hopefully become stable enough that the various players of the game who are frustrated at the moment, can play it again without any sort of interruptions. It may prove useful that these updates will help ensure Callisto Protocol runs optimally at the best settings without any kind of tedious interferences such as bugs or glitches.

Switch To A High-Performance Power Plan

There is a feature present in your system that many users might not know about and that is you can opt to swap to a different power management plan for your PC. It allows you to harvest more resources from your PC components in order to have increased efficiency in performing tasks on the system. The feature can be enabled with ease by simply following the steps we have listed below:

• You can directly search for Windows power plan settings from the search bar on your desktop screen.

• Now simply look under the Choose or Customize Power Plan section to spot the different modes that you can switch to at any time.
• The High-Performance Power Plan is hidden under the drop-down menu so simply click on the Hide Additional Plans option to view it.

Enable Windows Game Mode

As shown in the image above, the Game Mode feature designed and implemented by Microsoft can be used to boost the resources of the PC in order to run games efficiently. The boost that it provides seems almost unnoticeable but with a game such as the Callisto Protocol, you will need to do anything possible to help you get the best settings for it in order to improve the performance metrics.

Simply search for the Game Mode feature from the Windows Search Bar and you should be able to toggle the option in order to enable it for your system.

The Wrap-Up

The Survival Horror gaming genre had recently become stale in the past couple of years but thanks to new original titles built from the ground up like The Callisto Protocol, you can once again relive the experience of treading into a nightmarish cesspool filled with abominations and terror lurking at every doorstep. The game has received mixed reviews so far but that is mostly due to several performance and stuttering problems.

However, there is no denying the fact that the game has proven to be one of the most anticipated releases of all time due to the fact that it was a project inspired by the critically acclaimed Dead Space series. However, it goes to show that with the recent backlash that the game is suffering from, it is far off from maintaining a solid foundation for the series that had inspired it in the first place.

This wraps up our guide to the best graphics settings for the Callisto Protocol. The game is in a poor state right now on the PC and Xbox Series X platforms but thankfully the PS5 version is solid and shouldn’t have any problems whatsoever whilst running the game. Lastly, we would also suggest the obvious here which is that you should keep an eye on your Graphics Card Drivers as by updating them, you can boost your performance.

If you have any other questions about the graphical settings then be sure to let us know down below and we will be more than happy to point you in the right direction. As always, eXputer wishes you luck!

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