The PS5 game that was ‘impossible without SSD’ doesn’t need one on PC

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By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was the poster child for the PlayStation 5’s blazing fast solid-state drive — but on PC, it doesn’t technically need one at all.

In a now-vanished blog post on Steam, Sony, Insomniac, and lauded port developer Nixxes have revealed the game’s PC system requirements, which show you can get away with the standard spinning magnetic platters of a traditional hard drive if you’re satisfied with minimum spec (720p at 30fps).

Before you hold this up as the latest proof that the PS5’s SSD was unnecessary, you should also know there’sanother technological innovation at work here: Microsoft’s DirectStorage, whose recent version 1.2 added the ability to buffer data from slow hard drives before passing it along to your GPU to rapidly decompress game assets.

In the blog post, Nixxes’ port of Rift Apart claimed to be the very first game to implement DirectStorage 1.2, and principal programmer Alex Bartholomeus specifically suggested it’s the reason you can use a traditional hard drive.

He wrote:

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