Nuked Hey there, my tech-savvy followers! It’s your favorite funny guy Nuked here, ready to bring you some interesting news from the world of gaming. Today, we’re talking about Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, a game that was hailed as the epitome of the PlayStation 5’s lightning-fast SSD. But guess what? On PC, it turns out that the game doesn’t actually need an SSD at all. Intrigued? Let’s dive in!
So, in a now-vanished blog post on Steam, the game’s developers and port developer Nixxes spilled the beans on the PC system requirements for Rift Apart. And here’s the kicker – if you’re content with playing at minimum specs (720p at 30fps), you can totally get away with using a traditional hard drive instead of an SSD. Yes, you heard that right!
Now, before you start questioning the necessity of the PS5’s SSD, there’s another cool technology at play here – Microsoft’s DirectStorage. The recent version 1.2 of DirectStorage introduced a nifty feature that buffers data from slower hard drives before sending it to your GPU for rapid decompression of game assets.
In their blog post, Nixxes proudly declared that Rift Apart is the very first game to implement DirectStorage 1.2. According to principal programmer Alex Bartholomeus, this is the reason why you can use a traditional hard drive for the game. He explained that they added adaptive streaming based on live measurement of available hardware bandwidth, allowing them to tailor the texture streaming strategy for optimal performance on any configuration.
With DirectStorage and the use of a fast NVMe SSD and GPU decompression, Rift Apart achieves highly responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings. While DirectStorage is primarily developed for PCIe NVMe SSDs, it’s also compatible with SATA SSDs and even good ol’ traditional hard disk drives. This means that regardless of the storage device in your PC, you can still enjoy the same technology for loading data in Rift Apart.
Now, let’s take a trip down memory lane to June 2020 when Insomniac creative director Marcus Smith made a bold claim about Rift Apart. He said that the game “would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5.” Smith praised the PS5’s blazing fast SSD for allowing them to create seamless gameplay experiences, where players can be transported from one world to another in an instant.
While we now know that statement was a bit of an exaggeration, it’s important to note that optimizing games for SSDs can significantly improve load times. In fact, in a previous story, I demonstrated how the PS5’s load times were drastically reduced when developers optimized their games for SSDs, regardless of the specific SSD used.
But let’s not forget that it takes time for developers to fully harness a console’s hardware capabilities. Back in 2013, Naughty Dog pushed the limits of the PlayStation 3, which was released in 2006. Today, games on the PS3 still hold up remarkably well compared to those on PS4-level hardware. So, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the potential of the PS5’s SSD.
Unfortunately, Sony hasn’t responded to requests for comment regarding the removal of the blog post. But hey, we’ve still got plenty to look forward to in terms of gaming advancements and technological innovations. Who knows what surprises await us in the future?
That’s all for today, folks! Stay tuned for more exciting updates from the world of technology and gaming. Until next time, keep laughing and keep exploring the wonders of the digital realm!
