Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC specs and new features revealed

blog.playstation.com:

Next week, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is launching on PC! Many of you have asked for details about the technologies used and system requirements. Today we are answering those questions, and on top of that, we have some exciting new feature announcements.

To ensure a smooth dimension-hopping experience, our team implemented DirectStorage 1.2 in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC, including GPU decompression. 

Richard van der Laan, Senior Lead Programmer at Nixxes Software, explains: “To enable quick loading and instant transition between dimensions, the game needs to be able to load assets quickly. DirectStorage ensures quick loading times, and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while playing. Traditionally, this decompression is handled by the CPU, but at a certain point, there is an advantage to letting the GPU handle this, as this enables a higher bandwidth for streaming assets from storage to the graphics card. We use this to quickly load high-quality textures and environments with a high level of detail.”

Principal Programmer Alex Bartholomeus: “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.”

DirectStorage is developed to fully utilize the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but 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