GrayChild
Member
Turns out Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart CAN run on a hard drive... thanks to DirectStorage 1.2 on PC
This becomes the first DirectStorage 1.2 game with GPU decompression support.
www.pcgamer.com
When Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was initially announced, Insomniac's creative director, Marcus Smith, said that the game's dimensional rift gameplay "would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5."
However, it turns out that it is indeed possible.
The blog post also confirmed that this would be the first game to utilize DirectStorage with GPU compression.
"DirectStorage is designed to leverage the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard disk drives. This means that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC can utilize the same technology for loading data, regardless of the storage device in your system."
DirectStorage is a method for directly streaming data from an NVMe SSD to the GPU, bypassing the CPU and avoiding potential performance bottlenecks. This means that your GPU will handle decompressing game assets instead of your processor, improving performance.
With DirectStorage 1.2, developers can now use the same code for HDDs as well. Although legacy HDDs previously had some level of DirectStorage support, developers just had to jump through some extra hoops to make it work.