next week, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart launches on PC! Many of you have asked for details about the technology used and system requirements. We will answer these questions today. In addition, we have some exciting new feature announcements.
To ensure a smooth dimension hopping experience, our team implemented DirectStorage 1.2, including GPU decompression, for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC.
Richard van der Laan, Senior Lead Programmer at Nixxes Software, explains: DirectStorage reduces load times, uses his GPU decompression on high graphics settings, and streams assets in the background during playback. Traditionally, this decompression is handled by the CPU, but at some point having the GPU handle this has the advantage of allowing higher bandwidth for streaming assets from storage to the graphics card. We use this to quickly load high quality textures and environments with a high level of detail. ”
Alex Bartholomeus, Principal Programmer: “On PC, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart added adaptive streaming based on live measurements of available hardware bandwidth. The texture streaming strategy can be adjusted to achieve streaming, and the use of DirectStorage, fast NVMe SSDs and GPU decompression results in extremely responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings.”
DirectStorage was developed to take full advantage of the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also compatible with SATA SSDs and traditional hard disk drives. This means that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC uses the same technology to load data regardless of the storage device in your system.
Ray-traced ambient occlusion and XeGTAO
In our initial announcement, we shared that the PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will feature ray-traced reflections and new additions to natural outdoor lighting with ray-traced shadows. Today we can reveal another optional addition that further enhances the realism of the lights in the game. It’s Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion with different quality levels to choose from.
As graphics programmer Menno Bil explains: “Ambient occlusion is a technique used in games to simulate the effect of ambient lighting on a scene. Ambient lighting is a type of indirect lighting, light that is reflected from other surfaces. , it appears in creases, cracks and corners where the surfaces are close to each other.Commonly used AO techniques are SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and HBAO+ (Horizontal Base Ambient Occlusion). It’s not very expensive, but it doesn’t give a physically accurate result.RTAO makes more use of ray tracing to enhance the realism of ambient occlusion in-game.We have a ray tracing compatible We implemented RTAO as an addition for users with high-end systems with spare hardware and processing power.”
Menno and team also implemented XeGTAO, Intel’s implementation of Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion. Like SSAO and HBAO+, this solution is based on screen space. So while this technique doesn’t give him RTAO-like levels of realism, the performance cost is much lower, comparable to that of HBAO+ implementations. XeGTAO is available as an option in the game and works with graphics cards from all vendors.
“XeGTAO produces very high-resolution ambient occlusion that reveals very detailed geometry,” says Bil. “Overall, the output quality of XeGTAO is very high and gives a pleasing appearance.”
system requirements
Now that we’ve covered all the features of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for PC in detail, let’s dive into the system requirements. We put a lot of effort into scalability when creating the PC version of the game. Additional features such as ray-traced shadows, ray-traced ambient occlusion, and triple-screen support are aimed at users with the latest and greatest hardware, allowing them to push their system. It uses highly customizable graphics and features to scale your game to fit less powerful systems and make your game accessible to as many gamers as possible. Below is a summary of the recommended specs for the various graphics presets.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart can be enjoyed with an HDD and minimum system requirements, however, to experience the dimension-hopping gameplay that the game is known for as originally intended, you will need to exceed the recommended system requirements. recommended to use a combination of SSDs.
More details on AMD GPU ray tracing support coming soon
