Back in 2021, Insomniac Games’ “Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart” became the textbook example of the advantages of the PlayStation 5 and its super fast solid-state drive.
At the time, it was stated that PC’s simply couldn’t do what the game was doing – a title that includes instantaneous dimension hopping between vast levels and thus required an NVMe SSD that was PCIe Gen 4 and capable of at least 5.5Gb/s transfer.
Well things have changed in the two years since as the title is now coming to PC with the help of lauded port developer Nixxes Software who also handled the “Spider-Man” PC ports.
In a reportedly now-vanished blog post on Steam, Sony, Insomniac, and Nixxes revealed the game’s PC system requirements which indicated the title can technically be played on old HDDs but only on the absolutely lowest settings.
The title’s recommended specs are still a beast and anyone wanting to play 4K/60 with raytracing on will need an RTX4080 equivalent or higher to do so.
Some have used the opportunity to slam PlayStation for ‘lying’ in their old quote about working on slower SSDs. However, as it has been pointed out, the thing that makes this port even possible is that the title will be the very first major release to utilise the recently released version 1.2 of Microsoft’s DirectStorage – something that simply didn’t exist back in 2021.
That inclusion adds the ability to buffer data from slow hard drives before passing it along to your GPU to rapidly decompress game assets. The key advantage is this takes the pressure off the CPU as it moves many of the game’s more intensive tasks directly to the GPU and thus minimises hardware bandwidth bottlenecks.
One of the biggest complaints about console-to-PC ports of late has been about how CPU-heavy these ports have been, resulting in performance on titles being considerably worse on PC than on PS5 – even on PCs boasting considerably more horsepower on paper.
DirectStorage tech is one potential way to solve that but so far, game developers haven’t embraced the tech, with “Forspoken” utilising version 1.1 being about the only major title thus far to do so.
We’ll see how this fares when “Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart” comes to PC on July 26th.
Sources: The Verge, Tweak Town
