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Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – PC, PS5 & Steam Deck Tested

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 Kicking things off following my launch day 1st look video, I have now played a few more hours of the Nixxes port and it is as incredible impressive as I noted then. Not only does it scale above the PS5 if you have the PC hardware it also scales right down to the Steam Deck and you can now enjoy a true on the go R&C title in your hands. Nothing is lost in the old school 3D shooter cum platforming adventure and the quality and effort of the transition is borne out by how well it can run so long as the relevant compromises are made. I will have a full deeper dive into the visual quality and how well it runs with a wide range of hardware on IGN next week, but here I wanted to cover the comparison to a “perceived” equal spec machine in my RTX2070, what settings to use on the Steam Deck and go even deeper into how the game uses the hardware and what this means for PC.

 Lets start with the Steam Deck and the 2 options you have to run the game from, the internal SSD and an SD Card, here I used a Samsung EVO 256GB which maxes out with approx. 130MBs read speeds but likely below that in real world cases such as a game. This puts it close to an old mechanical HDD speeds but it will have much faster seek/latency of that drive but could actually have lower read and thus bandwidth levels during a game. The internal SSD offers, again theoretical speeds of approx. 2GB/s but is likely much lower but should exceed the SD card and a mechanical drive in both cases. Here using the rift rail section from the start of the game, we can see the difference between these drives can deliver some HUGE deltas.

 This can cause scenarios where the faster drive can put more pressure on the CPU/GPU to decompress the data whilst rendering the game as more data is hitting it in the same time. The opposite can also happen where the slower drive then starts to lag behind and the engine appears to try and catch-up so it begins streaming data in sooner. Fundamentally in this test section here it washes it faces as the Steam Deck is heavily bandwidth & GPU bound beyond the drive itself and as such the LPDDR5 RAM is likely another big bottleneck for the system during these moments when targeting such a fast level of data streaming. We can see the game seems to allocate a large Page file on the drive to virtualized more VRAM than is present, with it using the 8GB maximum within the OS, so the system is likely page swapping alongside everything else here. That said the results at these LOW settings with a 720p target using either FSR2 or Insomniacs Temporal Injection are very impressive. But it obviously could not render high quality textures, more geometry and RT with it already being maxed out here. I also note that 30fps is the target here on the machine, but I am using 60fps for my tests to see what levels it can reach.

 Collating our tests here the results clearly demonstrate that the Drive is only a small part of the games equation. The SD card delivered almost identical performance and 1 and 5% lows with  a 4 and 25% improvement on frame time and frame rate lows. But without this test they would be similar, however the SSD delivered the closer level of the developers aims, with it streaming into each world upwards of 10 seconds faster, and bigger more impactful sections later in the game also turn up. Such as this boss battle a little further on which can see some big impacts on all tested hardware in this video. Realistically you should run this from the SSD but if you have the smaller 64GB Steam Deck then an SD card like this or faster could deliver better performance but the long delays between these rifts and other fast moving streaming sections could be slower than on the internal drive. All that said the Steam Deck at my recommended settings here, which are really low across most elements with medium textures, 30fps cap at 900p using Temporal injection or FSR2 with the sharpening lowered does provide a superb way to enjoy this, now 2 year old game, but you would not know it as it feels, at times, still ahead of the pack.

Platform / DriveRead Speed (Uncompressed)
PlayStation 55.5GB/s
Steam Deck Internal SSD2GB/s
Crucial BX500 1TVB Sata600 SSD 6Gb/s652MB/s
Samsung EVO Select 256GB microSDXC UHS-I U3 (Steam Deck)130MB/s
1 TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD 7200 RPM SATA 600 126.5MB/s
Drive Speed Theoretical maximum Read Speeds

PC Testing

 Next up is my RTX2070 which has 16GB of DDR4 ram paired with a Zen 2700 @3.8GHz overclocked offering over 9tflops and 454GB/s bandwidth we have a good machine to represent the a good PC spec across the market. As noted Nixxes had used Direct Storage 1.2 to enable a buffered and unbuffered streaming of data from drive to ram, the options both mean compressed data comes off the drive into System Ram, and is then moved into Vram and finally decompressed as the GPU needs it. Now depending on your GPU and settings, effectively textures above Low most likely, the GPU decompresses this data as it needs it, reducing the CPU workload over other titles including Spiderman. As I noted in before though, once you move this work to the GPU that is not free and it can impact the game performance as the compute queue has to fit this in within its rendering work and it will also utilise more bandwidth. Quick summary the PS5 has only a single pool of GDDR ram so it only gets copied once from drive and is then decompressed for use for free by the dedicated hardware the console has. So none of this copy, request, move, deflate impacts CPU or GPU only bandwidth. ON PC not only does this all have to be done by the CPU and now GPU but it is still done twice, the perfect scenario will come later where PC hardware is updated to mimic the PS5 and offer drive to Vram direct which would help out some of the issues we see here and I have mentioned for years in my reviews.

 The long and short of this is although HDD can be used, even at low settings 900p TAA no RT the game is borderline unplayable at points like this. I must stress that the closed of sections and quitter exploration is still very good, but even the menu can be very slow and cumbersome using a HDD. My 7200RPM drive is actually very good with tested 126MBs read speeds helped by a small 64MB cache the drive has which can help out on occasion, but as you have already seen the hit to performance is far too great and although it does play on a HDD the quality of the game in both perforformance and delays is too large plus you also see a bigger impact to textures streaming in late, although the 8GB of Vram on my 2070 also plays a part here even at 1080p levels without RT. You can use a HDD but it does not mean you should and I recommend at least a Sata SSD or even better an NVMe drive such as the MP600, Rocket or Samsung Pro I covered a few years back in my PS5 SSD upgrade video.

Comparing the HDD to the SDcard and the Steam Deck we can see that it holds back this machine significantly with similar hangs and performance dips as the CPU/GPU are waiting for data often. Once my SSD is used, offering again tested here 5x the read speeds and bandwidth of nearly 600MB/s we see huge improvements in these like for like sections. 81% increase in frame rate lows, a staggering 1000% increase in frame time lows going from a worse case 783ms down to a worse 83ms, 1% lows are almost 400% faster and although average is within 5-8% of each other the gameplay quality, presentation and speed is night and day here, but again we can see that there is more here than just the drive speed.

As I covered in depth in my spiderman PC review, the Insomniac engine can exceed even the PCIe3x16 limit of near 16GBs bandwidth and unsurprisingly that is even higher and more frequent here. As the only card I have with a PCIex4 port is my RX6800 I cannot test that at maximum as AMD has RT disabled for now until it comes in a later patch. But I can show you the impact, as I did before, by forcing my RTX2070 down to an older 8GB/s limit compared to a full 16GBs. Again huge gains of 60% in Frame rate lows and a monstrous 200% decrease in Ftime highs and this affects the game throughout and not just in these streaming sections, showing you how much data is being consumed here. We see 100% improvement in both 1 and 5% lows which offer a far more consistent play quality and on average we gain 36% performance in these like for like settings using matched settings, as best I can to the PS5 Performance RT mode. Using DLSS DRS to a ceiling of 1440p and it can drop often in my counts to 810P, which although lower than the PS5 base of 1080p in this mode is still a gorgeous looking game on a 4K screen and aside some issues with Ray Tracing, such as much lower quality when DLSS is active and some slow streaming and almost macro blocking issues, they are close to the PS5 levels at High and can exceed them with better hardware.

 Finally to wrap up, just how does this superb port on my RTX2070 stack up to the PS5 in this same section, we as you can see even the PS5 can have some stutters during the heavy streaming, with a worse case of 66.65ms, which is still 2x better than the worse on my RTX2070 machine, Frame rate are much better, over 130% better in these small section as are the 1 and 5% lows to the tune of 50 and 100% lower which means on average the PS5 is 20% faster here with an average higher resolution also, meaning we again see a title designed around the PS5 even with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled running much closer to a 2080Ti or maybe even a 3080, something I will be testing in my IGN video next week.

All in all the quality here is a poster boy for all PC ports we require, including big studios from Microsoft, Epic, EA, Activision and more. Nixxes are certainly standing on the shoulders of giants with Insomniac but they have not just made the port to PC as a get it to run affair. The have refined it, re-written areas of memory management, A-synced the Shader complication before Epic even did and Microsoft, not too mention being the first to ship a game using DS 1.2 and GPU decompression ahead of anyone else. And the results are again industry leading, with the game having a console like boot up and loading, a solid and dynamic settings menus making it very easy to change settings on the fly and SEE what each does within the game. I am never ceased to be amazed by both these teams and although this is approaching a 3 year old game the visual quality. Hardware utilisation, performance levels and Software adaption are bleeding edge and if you want a fun, gorgeous, Pixar like game to play with your kids or on your own and relive the old gaming days then Rift apart is again one of my recommendations for all, just as it was in 2021 when it launched.