A new video that shows the first impressions of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC port shows how the game is running on a PS4 HDD.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC Impressive but Also Has Flaws
Digital Foundry has recently shared its first impressions on the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart stating that is “impressive overall” and “a knockout from a visual perspective.” The team also claims that they feel “some level of disappointment that overall polish isn’t quite where it should be.”
Sony PC Ports Have Bad Rep
Various PC ports published by Sony have unfortunately had some bad reputation these days. Some of these games that have disappointed fans are The Last of Us Part 1 and a few others. The former got mostly negative reviews when it launched on Steam and to this day, Naughty Dog is still releasing updates to fix issues and crashes. While this new game reportedly runs great on PC, it seems it will not be for all PC setups.
How The Game Runs on Old PS4 HDD
Digital Foundry reports their findings on running Ratchet and Clank on a PC desktop with the lowest setting and installed on an old PS4 HDD. They were really trying to test it out to reveal how it would still work even with minimal hardware specs.
“The difference between the console experience and the ‘very low’ setting is frankly immense in terms of data transfer… You’ll witness the carnage of what happens when you try to run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on a launch PS4 512GB HDD – even the very low setting doesn’t work and the game eventually crashes,” the team stated.
Running Badly on Old HDD
In a new Twitter post by Digital Foundry’s John Linneman, he shared a video of the game running on those low settings which obviously showed the results. It was awful and hard to watch especially for PC enthusiasts.
The video shows the game running on the lowest possible setting and it was running fine with a bit of slowdowns, but as Ratchet attempts to go through one of the portals, the game badly hangs for several seconds. A few seconds in, the game completely freezes and suddenly the next area appears.
We Warned You – Insomniac
Insomniac’s Director of Community and Marketing James Stevenson said, “As we said.” The developers did warn that running the game on lower specs and not on SSD would offer lower performance and not the optimum in previous posts. This is just confirmation of how badly it would play if this is the hardware PC players are going to use.
“To make the game work across as many PCs as possible, Nixxes did what Insomniac did not need to: necessarily, they scaled the game by introducing quality presets and in common with Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, that includes increasing fidelity for higher-end systems and reducing it where needed,” the team commented.
Modern HDDs Work Fine
Digital Foundry noted that the HDD used in the test was an old PS4 HDD with low RPM. If it was a more modern one, the game works just okay.
Steam Deck Verified
It was also confirmed recently that the game has been verified for Steam Deck. That means it is now fully playable and is supported on the handheld console.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is now available on PC.