PlayStation and port developer Nixxes Software have fully unveiled the list of recommended hardware specs for this month’s upcoming PC release of the excellent 2021 Insomniac platformer, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on July 26th.
It’s a particularly interesting one, given that when this game launched exclusively on the PS5 it was famously “not possible” to run on Sony’s older hardware due to its rift mechanics which saw players rapidly teleport or cause entire levels to load in and out of existence in an instant. While it’s definitely on the up, adoption of SSD storage in PCs, especially with the kind of performance that Sony spent a long time touting of their PS5 hardware, is still not completely widespread so fans have been eager to see what concessions or restrictions exist for those still rocking mechanical hard drives.
The good news is, despite what PlayStation’s marketing beats leading up the PS5 release of Rift Apart would have you believe, PC players will be able to play this new port sans an SSD. Granted, it won’t be the best experience, but importantly it’s possible and that’s largely thanks to DirectStorage 1.2 technology in the PC version of the game.
Principal Programmer Alex Bartholomeus says in the PlayStation Blog announcement, “For Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC, we added adaptive streaming based on live measurement of the available hardware bandwidth. This allows us to tailor the texture streaming strategy for the best possible texture streaming on any configuration. With DirectStorage, the use of a fast NVMe SSD and GPU decompression, this results in very responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings.”
The post goes on to explain that DirectStorage can fully utilise the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but that the technology is “also compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard disk drives. This means Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC can use the same technology for loading data, regardless of the storage device in your system.”
Meanwhile on the high end of things, the studio has added support for some graphical features over and above the PS5 version including Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion as well as Intel’s XeGTAO that works to simulate the effects of ambient occlusion in a similar way to screen space solutions with a high quality output at less of a performance cost than RTAO. The PC port also has ultrawide and triple monitor support, unlocked framerates, ray-traced shadows and support for upscaling technologies like DLSS 3 and FSR 2.
Check out the full breakdown of the hardware requirements for Rift Apart, including what you’ll need to get the “Ultimate Ray Tracing” experience, below:
