Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart PC Requirements: What GPUs You'll Need For Ray Tracing
One of the PlayStation 5's most beloved and exclusive titles, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, is headed for a release on PC thanks to the efforts of Nixxes Software (owned by Sony), which worked with Insomniac Games to port the title over to Windows. Touted as a "visual spectacle" with ray tracing support, you'll need some meaty hardware to play the game at its absolute highest visual quality setting.
In a short-lived blog post on Steam (it's been taken down for some unknown reason), Sony and the gang shared a breakdown of what kind of hardware you'll need to play the game. The highest tier is Ultimate Ray Tracing (graphics setting on 'High', ray tracing on 'Very High') for those who wish to turn on all the eye candy while still averaging a smooth 60 frames per second at a 4K resolution.
To do that, you'll need at least an Intel Core i7-12700K (12C/20T, up to 5GHz, 25MB L3 cache) or AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T, up to 4.8GHz, 64MB L3 cache) paired up with 32GB of RAM and either a GeForce RTX 4080 or Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. The specs also call for a solid state drive with 75GB of free space and Windows 10 (version 1909) 64-bit or higher.
Here's a look at the all the performance tiers and what you'll need to play at each one...
Notice at the lowest tier it's suggested you could get by with a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) instead of an SSD. There are a couple of reasons why this is interesting. First, back in 2020, Insomniac creative director Marcus Smith talked about Rift Apart being "a game that utilizes dimensions and dimensional rifts, and that would not have been possible without the solid state drive of the PlayStation 5." He credited the "screamingly fast" SSD as enabling game worlds that project players from one area to another "in near instantaneous speeds."
The other reason why this is interesting has to do with how the game can apparently be played on PC with an HDD. It purportedly has to do with being the first title to tap into Microsoft's DirectStorage 1.2 technology.
"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," Alex Bartholomeus, principal programmer, stated in a now deleted blog post.
"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," Bartholomeus added.
Even so, the official spec requirements call for an SSD at anything above the minimum. The recommended specs to average 60 FPS at 1080p at Medium settings call for a Core i5-8400 or Rzyen 5 3600 processor, 16GB of RAM, GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 5700 GPU, and 75GB of SSD storage. Nothing too wild there.
You can see the other tiers in the chart above (tap or click to enlarge so it's actually readable). Beyond the hardware specs, the PC version will introduce support for ultrawide monitors (21:9, 32:9, and 48:9), including triple-monitor setups, as well as the latest upscaling technologies (NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2, Intel XeSS, and Insomniac's Temporal Injection).
You can preorder Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC for $59.99 on Steam. It releases on July 26, 2023.
