Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC takes advantage of DirectStorage, SSD recommended for best performance
Blast into the dimension-shifting adventure with next-gen features.
Next week on July 26, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart releases on PC, and to get you up to speed, Sony and Nixxes Software have provided details about the technologies used and system requirements.
One thing of note with the PC version: the developer recommends you use a solid-state drive instead of the HDD. While you can play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart using the HDD and the minimum system requirements, the studio encourages you to use the SSD in combination with the recommended system requirements or higher to experience the game as originally intended.
To ensure things run smoothly, the team at Nixxes implemented DirectStorage 1.2, including GPU decompression. This was to ensure quick loading and instant transition between dimensions, as it allows assets to be loaded quickly.
DirectStorage ensures quick loading times, and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while playing. Usually, this is handled by the CPU, but letting the GPU handle this instead enables a higher bandwidth for streaming assets from storage to the graphics card.
The team also added adaptive streaming based on live measurement of the available hardware bandwidth. So, with DirectStorage and a fast NVMe SSD and GPU decompression, it will result in responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings.
DirectStorage is developed to utilize the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs but is also compatible with SATA SSDs, and even traditional hard disk drives.
When announced for PC, it was revealed the game would feature ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows. Today Nixxes announced it will also feature an option for ray-traced ambient occlusion and XeGTAO, Intel’s implementation of Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion. The latter generates a very high-resolution ambient occlusion that shows even the smallest details in geometry with a very high output, resulting in a "pleasant look."
You can look over the full specs for the PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart below.
Details regarding ray-tracing support for AMD GPUs are coming soon.
