Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PC tech analysis - this port needed more time

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is out now on PC, two years after it launched as a PS5 exclusive. It's always fascinating to see how Sony's flagship titles fare on PC, especially those produced by porting specialist Nixxes. Rift Apart is also a cutting-edge effort - it's one of the first to support DirectStorage GPU decompression, which ought to shrink load times and raise performance. This analysis reviews the quality of the PC port at launch (with some commentary on the new patch that just 'dropped') with derived PS5-equivalent and optimised settings for a range of hardware, plus DirectStorage 1.2 tests. There's plenty to praise from Insomniac's latest PC release - along with a litany of graphical bugs and issues that suggest the game needed a little more time in the oven.

Ratchet and Clank's options are immediately familiar to anyone that's played Nixxes' Spider-Man PC ports, with a real-time tweaking menu and a good array of options for users to take advantage of including upscaling options from all GPU vendors. The settings menu is generally easy to use - though a flash effect when making changes sometimes obscures the nature of the change. Weirdly though, the main menu runs below 60fps on mid-range hardware without obvious CPU or GPU utilisation.

There are more serious issues elsewhere in the game, which suggest Rift Apart has launched without the typical polish we'd expect from a Nixxes release. For example, we experienced a handful of game crashes on a range of hardware within the first few hours of play, from a high-end Core i9 12900K and RTX 4090 rig to a minimum-spec build with the Ryzen 3 3100 and RX 570.

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