Conclusion

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a port of the highly successful PS5 exclusive released in 2021. It marks the first Ratchet and Clank game to come to the PC Master Race. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, it's a 3D platformer action-adventure. In Rift Apart, players embark on a roller coaster story across several planets and multiple dimensions, controlling several playable characters. The characters are incredibly charming and bring life to the vibrant world. The story could be right out of a cartoon hit movie, such as Toy Story or Minions. The game doesn't take itself too seriously, offering insanely big guns with funny mechanics and intense characters combined with entertaining gameplay. An additional positive aspect is the adjustable difficulty and accessibility, making the game inclusive for everyone, including younger or less experienced gamers. If you like the genre—highly recommended, tons of fun.

Rift Apart has been ported by Nixxes who are masters at bringing console games to the PC platform. As game engine Insomniac Engine is used, which we've seen on recent Spider-Man releases before. In terms of features that engine checks all the boxes. It supports several ray tracing technologies: RT reflections, RT shadows and RT ambient occlusion. You're also able to use all the upscalers, including NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS and IGTI (Insomniac Games Temporal Injection). As expected from an NVIDIA-sponsored title, there's also support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. An interesting new addition is Direct Storage, with asset decompression on the GPU. Direct Storage promises faster load times, better VRAM management and stutter-free experiences by streaming data directly from the SSD onto the graphics card. Direct Storage 1.0 had to stream compressed data to the CPU, for decompression which was then sent to the GPU. With Direct Storage 1.2 the GPU handles decompression as well, which helps reduce load on the CPU and smoothen out things. We did test the game on a SATA SSD and it ran still perfectly fine without any noticeable degradation.

In terms of visuals, Ratchet and Clank offers an amazing experience that's one of the best I've ever seen. The worlds are intricately designed, with tons of details and outstanding textures. Models are richly detailed, with high polygon counts. Earlier this week we tested Remnant II using Unreal Engine 5. I have to admit that Ratchet and Clank looks better, and runs very well, more on that later. If you check out our screenshots you'll have to agree, the visuals here are on par with some Hollywood cartoon productions. While of course it is easier to produce a cartoon world than a life-like photorealistic rendering, I still had to "wow" and "oh" many times during my playthrough. Unreal Engine 4's shader compilation stuttering is a total non-issue in Ratchet and Clank, because it's a different engine, which ships the precompiled shader objects with the game download. Controls with mouse and keyboard are perfect, no complaints here.

Hardware requirements of the game are quite alright at the highest "Very High" profile. Actually, that profile doesn't max out many options, so I've manually set everything to max (with RT off) to align with our standard testing method. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with those settings you need a RTX 4060 or Radeon RX 6700 XT. RX 5700 XT is kinda close though, with 57 FPS. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you'll need a RTX 4070 Ti, 3070 Ti or RX 6700 XT. 4K60 is in reach for RX 6900 XT, RX 7900 XT, RTX 3090 and RTX 4070 Ti and faster. These requirements are pretty manageable, that's why I've enabled ray tracing for my playthrough (and the screenshots).

Our image quality comparisons confirm that ray tracing makes a big difference in Ratchet and Clank. While the world looks good with RT off, no doubt, turning on the rays makes a pretty big difference, especially when it comes to shadows and reflections. The map designers carefully placed reflective surfaces throughout the world, many of which turn from "mirror" to "amazingly subtle" once you enable ray traced reflections. This is what I want to see with RT. Good job! I also liked that there's several detail settings for the RT effects, so you can fine-tune them to suit your hardware. What is unexpected is that at launch the game only supports ray tracing on Intel Arc and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. AMD Radeon gamers will have a bit longer, the developer confirmed that Radeon RT support is coming after launch, but didn't give any estimate.

What will be challenging for older hardware is the VRAM requirements which are pretty high. Even at the lowest setting, with RT off, the game allocates around 8 GB VRAM. Our performance benchmarks clearly show 8 GB cards at a disadvantage, but surprisingly the game still runs at smooth FPS, without stutter, just lower FPS than you'd expect from a given card. For example, the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB gets 75 FPS at highest setting, usually you'd expect RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB to run at roughly the same FPS, but here it gets 102 FPS, a 33% difference. The game is quite smart about the way it allocates VRAM, on cards with smaller VRAM sizes (which it detects correctly) it will preload fewer assets and generally do the right thing, to ensure things run without stuttering. Maybe Direct Storage helps in this case, because it can load assets from disk faster and with less latency.