Sony Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PC port from Nixxes) - Digital Foundry technical analysis posted

[Dre801]

Watched it.  Seems like a solid port with some minor issues.  The low spec setting Rich is playing on isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

[crispy4000]

Yes, I'm breaking the rules to post this.  Stuff like this being posted first there is a good enough case for why it's needed.

[Mr.Vic20]

Are there any written reviews of the PC port up? 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Seems we have a preliminary response to “did Sony lie about needing and SSD”. And that answer looks to be that if the alternative is could the game work on a PS4, No. No it could not. Sony didn’t lie. 
 

A PC with a hard drive can play the game ok, but not with a lowest spec PC. 

[stepee]

Also it was always a matter of at what quality to pull off the transitions. Like, obviously if the textures are heavily tuned down and the amount of actual data they need to stream is lessened, then a hdd could pull it off. Ps4 could pull it off too with just prerecorded scenes lol

 

Im mad I didn’t bring my laptop w me

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Pre-rendered, maybe. But I don’t think a transition to a cutscene and back to gameplay would be that smooth on a PS4 in the middle of action. And considering some of the rifting around is done manually and not as part of a scripted sequence that wouldn’t have worked. 
 

DF apparently used a PS4 HDD on the Min spec PC and it lost all frames as the game tried to render during rifts and often crashed. And that was during the scripted rifts. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

4 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

Yes, I'm breaking the rules to post this.  Stuff like this being posted first there is a good enough case for why it's needed.

Take a screen cap and post an imgur link.  It's not that hard.

[stepee]

24 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Pre-rendered, maybe. But I don’t think a transition to a cutscene and back to gameplay would be that smooth on a PS4 in the middle of action. And considering some of the rifting around is done manually and not as part of a scripted sequence that wouldn’t have worked. 
 

DF apparently used a PS4 HDD on the Min spec PC and it lost all frames as the game tried to render during rifts and often crashed. And that was during the scripted rifts. 

 

Oh it wouldn’t be smooth! But it would be mostly “fine” for the tail end of a system. I mean this actually to say more so that I agree with you and just that it’s silly to try to say “sony lied” or whatever because it’s always just been a matter of how much sacrifice people would be willing to accept. Any system running any game is “possible” at this point.

[best3444]

I continued my last save today and played for an hour. I'm determined to beat this! It's just utter eye candy and absolutely beautiful in motion. It's fun too and I'm enjoying the characters especially Rivet.

[crispy4000]

23 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Take a screen cap and post an imgur link.  It's not that hard.

Of a video?

[Biggie]

This is on sale for $29.39 on the PSstore. 58% off. What the fuck? Why not round that shit off lol

[eventide11]

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

This is on sale for $29.39 on the PSstore. 58% off. What the fuck? Why not round that shit off lol

It was free on PS Premium 

 

[Ominous]

Running great 1440p native with dlaa for aa. 

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Ominous said:

Running great 1440p native with dlaa for aa. 

 

shader precompile?

[Ominous]

10 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

shader precompile?

Have not notice any stutter or a need for it to recompile. 

[Ominous]

 

 

[Keyser_Soze]

6 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Take a screen cap and post an imgur link.  It's not that hard.

 

6 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

Of a video?

 

Yeah just a really long gif of the xxxeeet!

 

Also, Imgur isn't the way to go anymore since they changed their policy. Just bad advice all around.

[Spork3245]

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

So does everyone refuse to play Intel’s game and not pronounce “XESS” as “excess”? Or was it never meant to actually be pronounced that way? 

[AbsolutSurgen]

12 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

So does everyone refuse to play Intel’s game and not pronounce “XESS” as “excess”? Or was it never meant to actually be pronounced that way? 

I have never yet been in a situation where I wanted to say it out loud (not sure if I have ever typed it either). 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Digital Foundry's analysis has been posted:

 

Can Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on PC match - and exceed - the PS5 experience?

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

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Digital Foundry shares first impressions on an eagerly awaited port.

 

Quote

 

We received code for this relatively late, so our deep dive review coverage is still work-in-progress, but we have put together a detailed 'let's play' video that shows three members of the Digital Foundry team playing the game on three very different pieces of hardware. I played on a max spec PC, featuring a Core i9 12900K paired with an RTX 4090 and 32GB of fast DDR5, while Rich Leadbetter enjoyed the min spec experience: a Ryzen 3 3100 working in concert with 8GB of DDR4, while an RX 570 4GB is essentially the min spec RX 470 4GB with a circa 100MHz overclock. Meanwhile, John Linneman defined the baseline experience, running on PlayStation 5 in performance RT mode - our preferred way to play.

 

I'm not going to spoil too much of the video, but one of the prime takeaways is that some stutter issues apart (which may be down to the Radeon driver, but looks more like a CPU bottleneck), the minimum spec system works fairly well. Despite running at 720p on 'very low' settings, the game is still recognisably Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, just with a significant detail haircut and very, very low resolution textures. Performance varies between 30fps and 60fps, but again, it does seem like running the RX 570 at 720p causes CPU bottlenecks. The issue we found with this card is that the 4GB of framebuffer memory proved unstable in the build we first had - and crashes were possible simply by moving from the very low to low preset.

 

 

Quote

 

All of which leads us onto one of the more inane discussion points we've seen: the fact that the game runs on slower machines with no SSD when Insomniac claimed that the SSD was essential for the game they'd created. First of all, the difference between the console experience and the 'very low' setting is frankly immense in terms of data transfer. Secondly, the comment was likely made in relation to the other development platform available to them, the PlayStation 4. In the video you'll witness the carnage of what happens when you try to run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on a launch PS4 512GB HDD - even the very low setting doesn't work and the game eventually crashes. The point is that to make the game work across as many PCs as possible, Nixxes did what Insomniac did not need to: necessarily, they scaled the game by introducing quality presets and in common with Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, that includes increasing fidelity for higher-end systems and reducing it where needed.

 

Nixxes uses the GPU-accelerated DirectStorage 1.2 as its API of choice for handling the task of replicating PlayStation 5's storage strengths, but there has been some confusion about how it is deployed in the wake of reported comments describing how it's only used on higher graphical settings, the implication being that lower settings use the CPU instead. Having talked to Nixxes about it, the reality is that both CPU and GPU decompression are used on different classes of assets.

So, larger assets such as textures are in the GDeflate format and they all decompressed using the GPU, without exception. Smaller assets, like some models and very small textures (at the end of the mip chain) are compressed with LZ4 and decompress on the CPU instead. The end result is a scalable system that works across a range of PC set-ups and can even operate on a hard drive too - albeit with notable pauses on the portal jumps.

 

 

Quote

 

Maxed out, there are a number of inexplicable graphical regressions you'll see in the video. There are missing transparency effects present on PS5, but absent on the maxed PC experience. We also noted incorrect opacity levels, non-working texture filtering on some surfaces and even texture loading issues, where the PS5-grade asset simply never loaded on the PC game. There are ray tracing consistency problems where the maxed experience can have some areas that are of a lower quality than PS5, while driver issues have seen Nixxes completely remove RT support for AMD owners - for now. I've even had issues with my gamepad where X and Y axes invert on their own for no reason. I'd also expect to see some improvement in streaming performance: right now, the portal transition process does indeed complete more quickly on PlayStation 5 than it does on the most high-end PC around.

 

All of these issues give the impression that - once again - a PC port has launched when it's not in a fully polished state. We are already over two years on from the debut of the original PlayStation 5 game, so waiting another month or two for an actually finished and polished PC version should not be a big deal. Whether it's with Ratchet and Clank, Sackboy: A Big Adventure or The Last of Us Part 1, Sony keeps shipping games with obvious problems at launch.

 

 

Quote

 

We're still working on the coverage, but the table above gives you some idea of the key quality settings and where PlayStation 5's performance RT mode sits in relation to the new PC port. Where a setting is marked as medium/high, I could spot no real difference between the two in my test-case scenarios, while the LOD setting seems to sit at some point between medium and high on the PC scale. While our optimised settings put the RT reflections at an equivalent to PS5's high, I should point out that DLSS reconstruction is not quite as detailed as the checkerboarding on reflections that PS5 uses.

 

So, that's where we are with Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart based on the time we've had with it. It's impressive overall, highly scalable (Steam Deck verification on this one actually seems justified!) and a knockout from a visual perspective - but I can't help but feel some level of disappointment that overall polish isn't quite where it should be.

 

 

 

[Nokra]

17 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

 

Yeah just a really long gif of the xxxeeet!

 

Also, Imgur isn't the way to go anymore since they changed their policy. Just bad advice all around.

Not to get too far off-topic here, but to which Imgur policy change are you referring? 

[Biggie]

Someone buy me this so I can experience the eye candy on my PS5

[stepee]

17 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

 

Yeah just a really long gif of the xxxeeet!

 

Also, Imgur isn't the way to go anymore since they changed their policy. Just bad advice all around.

 

I didn’t notice it was a video when i upvoted, I think it’s pretty rare that there is a situation where here’s a video that you can’t just post a direct link to or to another site. This seems to be a rare exception to the rule.

 

I’d be fine with an exception for that I guess, but I really don’t think it’s frequent enough of a situation to be needed. Generally, for like the “exceptions” Jason does, a screenshot hosted on a site is more than enough.

[Nokra]

34 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Someone buy me this so I can experience the eye candy on my PS5

Get PS+ and it's yours! 

[AbsolutSurgen]

21 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I didn’t notice it was a video when i upvoted, I think it’s pretty rare that there is a situation where here’s a video that you can’t just post a direct link to or to another site. This seems to be a rare exception to the rule.

 

I’d be fine with an exception for that I guess, but I really don’t think it’s frequent enough of a situation to be needed. Generally, for like the “exceptions” Jason does, a screenshot hosted on a site is more than enough.

I didn't notice it was a video either -- to me it doesn't really matter.

I'm sure @Commissar SFLUFAN can tell us what the rules are.  I had thought all Twiiter links were banned.

For the specific video, if someone REALLY wanted to watch it, a screen shot is enough for them to spend 30 seconds to find it to watch it.  IMHO, after watching it, there was nothing in it that a 2 second summary couldn't adequately describe.

18 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

 

Yeah just a really long gif of the xxxeeet!

 

Also, Imgur isn't the way to go anymore since they changed their policy. Just bad advice all around.

Is this the policy that they are deleting content that doesn't get any views that is uploaded anonymously?  Or their policy against porn?  Or something else?

[stepee]

5 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

I didn't notice it was a video either -- to me it doesn't really matter.

I'm sure @Commissar SFLUFAN can tell us what the rules are.  I had thought all Twiiter links were banned.

For the specific video, if someone REALLY wanted to watch it, a screen shot is enough for them to spend 30 seconds to watch it.  IMHO, after watching it, there was nothing in it that a 2 second summary couldn't adequately describe.

Is this the policy that they are deleting content that doesn't get any views that is uploaded anonymously?  Or their policy against porn?  Or something else?

 

Agreed.

[best3444]

Well I played 4 hours of this today and had  a complete blast. I finally sat down and focused on the actual game Raher than just looking at the amazing visuals. It's truly fantastic and I'm completely hooked. I'm definitely beating it now because I really love the characters and story. The gameplay is an utter joy and the pacing is magnificent. I swear I will beat this by the weekend.

 

Obviously the visuals just continue to amaze me. After coming off FF16 this is such a breath of fresh air. So colorful, vibrant, and a silly premise that actually hooks you in. I'm so glad I came back to this. 

[stepee]

Rachet was my goty, I think it’s phenomenal and as good as the ps3 trilogy and Rachet is my girl

[crispy4000]

13 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

I didn't notice it was a video either -- to me it doesn't really matter.

I'm sure @Commissar SFLUFAN can tell us what the rules are.  I had thought all Twiiter links were banned.

For the specific video, if someone REALLY wanted to watch it, a screen shot is enough for them to spend 30 seconds to find it to watch it.  IMHO, after watching it, there was nothing in it that a 2 second summary couldn't adequately describe.

Footage of a next gen game running on the Deck is enough to warrant more than a screen grab.  Nothing is a given on that platform, and how good/poor it is can be in the eye of the beholder.

 

Going through the effort to screengrab it so someone can go search it on the site itself to watch is asinine.  Actively discourages sharing something interesting.

 

For all I care, D1P is doing nothing to stop Elon from making money off twitter.  He’s burning it to the ground and killing it just fine himself.  If it’s the principle of the matter, there’s probably even more reason to ban Reddit, with its history of questionable and exploitative subreddits and recent 3rd party apps policy that kneecaps their moderation.  But of course that’s off the table, because we can’t point to a cult of personality running the show.  Without a head figure to rally against it’s just not a big deal apparently.

 

I’m not for censoring any of these sites here for the record.  If truly appalling content is linked to, that should be for moderation here to act upon.  Until then, I say let bygones be bygones and let the egomaniac ride out his sinking ship.

[stepee]

1 minute ago, crispy4000 said:

Footage of a next gen game running on the Deck is enough to warrant more than a screen grab.  Nothing is a given on that platform, and how good/poor it is can be in the eye of the beholder.

 

Going thorough the effort to screengrab it so someone can go search it on the site itself is asinine, defeats the point.

 

I think it’s an exception that is rare enough for things that are non critical enough, that everyone will be fine if we just do screen grabs and sometimes someone has to use google 

[stepee]

And just because I’m in canada doesn’t mean you guys can force me to agree with @AbsolutSurgen

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I'm fine with certain exceptions to the Twitter/X prohibitions for information such as the kind that @crispy4000 presented.

 

[stepee]

Just now, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

I'm fine with certain exceptions to the Twitter/X prohibitions for information such as the kind that @crispy4000 presented.

 

 

What about when it’s just that Jason is bored 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 minute ago, stepee said:

 

What about when it’s just that Jason is bored 

 

Absolutely not.