Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Another PlayStation 5 exclusive has arrived on PC

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the latest PlayStation title to transition over to PC, and one of the first PlayStation 5 exclusives to make the move. With support for ray tracing, its its support for DirectStorage 1.2, Rift Apart is Sony’s most technologically advanced PC release to date, thanks to the hardware boffins at Nixxes we Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has launched on PC with relatively few issues, though we do feel that this game could have used a little more time in the oven. 

With The Last of Us Part 1 launching in such a poor state, it is refreshing to see Sony’s latest PlayStation-to-PC conversion launch in a relatively good state. That said, we have experienced several crashed during our testing, and have seen graphics issues in some instances. That said, these issues were not pervasive, and the game was very playable with the right hardware.

On PC, Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart is launching with support for all major resolution upscaling solutions, with the game supporting DLSS 3 on compatible Nvidia’s GPUs, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, and Intel’s XeSS AI upscaling tech. Insomniac Games’ own temporal injection technology is also supported, giving PC gamers four upscaling options.

Early Issues  

Aside from the few crashes that we faced, it is worth noting that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is launching without ray tracing support on AMD Radeon graphics cards. This is due to a bug that Nixxes and AMD are currently working to address. This bug means that ray tracing is effectively an Nvidia RTX -only feature at launch. Sadly, we do not have access to an Intel ARC graphics card for testing, so we cannot confirm is ray tracing works with Intel ARC graphics at this time.  

Benchmark Scene

To benchmark Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, we have tested the game’s iconic dimensional breakdown scene, which sees Ratchet & Clank rapidly warp between dimensions. This scene is one of Rift Apart’s more demanding scenes, and it highlights the game’s utilisation of Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.2 technology and its support for GPU decompression.   

Review Contents

– CPU Performance

– Ray Tracing’s Graphical Impact

– Preset Scaling – Very Low to Very High

– Optimisation Tips and Optimised Settings

– Ray Tracing Optimisations

– DLSS 3 – Super Resolution & Frame Generation

– FidelityFX Super Resolution

– 1080p Benchmarks – RT On and RT Off

– 1440p Benchmarks – RT On and RT Off

– 4K Benchmarks – RT On and RT Off

– VRAM Utilisation

– Conclusion – More Polish Needed

GPU Drivers

When testing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, we utilised the newest Nvidia and AMD GPU drivers that were available to us at the time of the game’s launch. These drivers were Radeon’s AMD Software Adrenalin Edition version 23.7.2 drivers, and Nvidia’s GeForce 536.67 WHQL drivers for Windows 10/11.

CPU Performance