It looked like the next PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart had already exhausted its supply of brilliant Windows-exclusive features to show off; we already knew this would happen with DLSS, DLSS 3, FSR 2, and ray-traced lighting and shadows. Turns out there’s plenty more, as port developers Nixxes Software used a Sony blog post to detail a few new tech toys, including Rift Apart’s Microsoft DirectStorage 1.2 support.
DirectStorage is both one of the most exciting recent developments in gaming hardware and one of the most underutilized: it essentially adapts your PC’s process to read data from an SSD or HDD in a way that can dramatically reduce game load times, but has so far only reached prime time in Forspoken. I guess the upside is that once Rift Apart is released on July 26, DirectStorage’s list of compatible games will increase by 100%?
The blog post, written by Nixxes Online Community Specialist Julian Huijbregts, also announces that the PC version of Rift Apart will also get entirely new ambient occlusion effects and, for those without an RT-capable graphics card, Intel XeGTAO support. This is another form of ambient occlusion that the post says should perform better than conventional AO techniques such as SSAO and HBAO+. Rift Apart will actually be the very first game to be released with XeGTAO up and running.
The post ends with system requirements for Rift Apart, which were already out in the wild after a seemingly accidental Steam announcement was posted last week. Luckily I was too busy to write them at the time, so I can just put them here now as if it were brand new information, huh?
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Minimum PC Specs (720p/30fps)
- GPUs: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 / AMD Radeon RX 460
- CPU: Intel Core i3-8100 / AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- RAM: 8 GB
- SE: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Storage: 75 GB of hard disk space (SSD recommended)
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Recommended PC Specs (1080p/60fps)
- GPUs: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 5700
- CPU: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- RAM: 16 GB
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Storage: 75 GB SSD space
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart High PC specs (1440p/60fps or 4K/30fps)
- GPUs: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060Ti/AMD Radeon RX6800
- CPU: Intel Core i5-11400 / AMD Ryzen 5 5600
- RAM: 16 GB
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Storage: 75 GB SSD space
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Amazing Ray Tracing PC Specs (1440p/60fps or 4K/30fps)
- GPUs: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070
- CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- RAM: 16 GB
- SE: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Storage: 75 GB SSD space
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Ultimate Ray Tracing PC Specs (4K/60fps)
- GPUs: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080
- CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K / AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- RAM: 32 GB
- SE: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Storage: 75 GB SSD space
Those who also follow console gaming news might recall how Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart acted as an advertisement for the PS5’s SSD, with developers Insomniac Games suggesting that the game’s instant dimension-hopping mechanics were only possible with the data processing speed of an NVMe drive. The lack of a hard SSD requirement in these specs indicates that it may be a marketing ploy, though I’ll be interested to see if there’s a longer transition during those interreality jumps to a slower hard drive. Again, DirectStorage 1.2 works on mechanical drives as well as SSDs, so maybe that will help.
I think this is all encouraging: DirectStorage’s load time reductions and texture streaming improvements show that PC tweaks aren’t limited to purely aesthetic and shiny ray tracing trinkets. And while I haven’t seen it in action yet, XeGTAO might be a welcome addition for those running low-end systems. Some of Sony’s previous PlayStation ports didn’t go well – The Last of Us Part 1 took months of post-release patches to be in order – but I have a good feeling about Rift Apart.
… No one quotes that in the comments if it’s terrible.
