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DirectStorage 1.2 has made it possible for Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart to run on a PC without an SSD. If you remember back to 2021 when Sony kicked off its marketing campaign for the game, the company boasted how developer Insomniac Games would not have been able to make Rift Apart without the power of the PS5 SSD. It seems that wasn’t actually the case.
The lowest PC system requirements claim that users with a mechanics HDD can still play the game. That’s if you’re okay with running Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart at 720p 30fps, of course. While the PS5 SSD is still super fast and the console’s data conversions make it impossible to run the game on say, a PS4, DirectStorage 1.2 is the force at work behind this whole “mechanical HDD running the game”.
DirectStorage 1.2 has the ability to buffer data from slow hard drives to the GPU before the hardware rapidly decompresses the information for the game. Nixxes explains in a blog post how they used DirectStorage 1.2 to bring this feature to life.
For Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC we added adaptive streaming based on live measurement of the available hardware bandwidth. This allows us to tailor the texture streaming strategy for the best possible texture streaming on any configuration. With DirectStorage, the use of a fast NVMe SSD and GPU decompression, this results in very responsive texture streaming even at the highest settings. DirectStorage is developed to fully utilize the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard disk drives. This means Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC can use the same technology for loading data, regardless of the storage device in your system.
Of course, the whole “Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart can’t run on anything else because the PS5 SSD is magic” debate has already been foiled in the past. Soon after the game launched and Sony unlocked upgradable SSD support for the PS5, users found that running a slower SSD on the console would play the game just fine.
So obviously Sony just piggybacked on the PS5 SSD to market Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and this new PC release proves that. The storage tech is fast, but a few years later, it really isn’t a marketing point anymore.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart launches on 26 July on PC. Check out the full PC system requirements here.
Marco is the owner and founder of GLITCHED. South Africa’s largest gaming and pop culture website. GLITCHED quickly established itself with tech and gaming enthusiasts with on-point opinions, quick coverage of breaking events and unbiased reviews across its website, social platforms, and YouTube channel.
