Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC takes advantage of DirectStorage, SSD recommended for best performance

Next week, on July 26, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC versions, and to bring you up to speed, Sony and Nixxes Software have provided details on the technologies used and system requirements.

One thing to watch out for with the PC version: The developer recommend using a solid state drive instead of the hard drive. 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 nixes team implemented Direct Storage 1.2, including GPU decompression. This was to ensure fast loading and instant transition between dimensions as it allows assets to load quickly.

DirectStorage ensures fast load times and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while gaming. Usually this is handled by the CPU, but letting the GPU handle this instead allows for more bandwidth to stream assets from storage to the graphics card.

The team also added adaptive streaming based on live measurement of available hardware bandwidth. So with DirectStorage and fast GPU decompression and NVMe SSDs, it will result in responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings.

DirectStorage is built to use the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but is also backwards compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard drives.

When it was announced for PC, it was revealed that the game would feature ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows. Nixxes announced today that 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 displays even the smallest details of the geometry with very high performance, resulting in a “nice look”.

You can check out the full specifications for the PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart below.

Details on ray tracing support for AMD GPUs will be forthcoming.