A while back, I wrote a DF Direct Weekly blog explaining why Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s PC port is crucial for the future of the platform, and last week’s official specs reveal is validation of sorts for that initial article. The game remains a highly important release for the PC format because it’s the first game built from the ground up around PlayStation 5’s solid-state storage and hardware decompression capabilities – and we now have confirmation that the port will be using DirectStorage, the Microsoft API designed to bring current-gen console-level storage performance to the PC platform.
What’s interesting is how it’s going to be deployed. GPU-driven DirectStorage is supported on Ratchet and Clank, the idea being that the decompressing the data from storage is handled by the graphics hardware rather than the CPU. However, it seems that the port will carry out internal bandwidth and compute benches on the fly – and then decide which PC component works best for the decompression tasks. So, for example, let’s say you have a highly performant CPU like a Core i9 13900K, but you have a less capable graphics card. The game may decide that instead of using GPU resources, it’ll switch to the thread-heavy CPU instead.
Either way, we can’t wait to check this out for a bunch of reasons, but I personally believe it’s going to be the decompression situation that’s more important than the presence of the SSD itself. After all, I’ve already run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on the absolute worst SSD money can buy for the PlayStation 5. The 250GB SN750 SE has under-spec read speeds, and no DRAM cache, yet plays the game just fine. I’ve even taped off pins on the drive to reduce its read speeds to 1.7GB/s and everything still worked OK. This suggests that it’s the hardware decompression tech within the PS5 that is doing the heavy lifting – and it’ll be interesting to see how both CPU and GPU solutions handle the game.
