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PC Gamer: Turns out Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart CAN run on a hard drive thanks to DirectStorage 1.2

iHaunter

Member
Didn't require the SSD after all, but does require the compression tech which wasn't available on PC until late last year. Glad to see this is becoming more widely used. Will be interesting to see some benchmarks when the game launches across the different drive types.
It 100% does require the SSD. Unless you want to play at 720p.
 

CrustyBritches

Gold Member
Steam deck users would.
Depending on how heavy the game is we might be playing this at 800p(FSR 2 'Balanced')...so 480p(16:10)??💪 Ironically, many Deck users have NVMe drives ranging from 2200MB/s to 3500MB/s.
That is never what this was about, it's about insomniac claiming it couldn't be run as-is without the ps5 SSD.
Well yeah, but he said that in June 2020:
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a game that utilizes dimensions and dimensional rifts. That would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5. The SSD is screamingly fast. It allows us to build worlds and project players from one place to another in near instantaneous speeds.

Nixxes says in the removed blog post from July 2023:
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.

Direct Storage 1.2 SDK was released April 2023. IIRC, Forspoken was the first Direct Storage game and that released January 2023. Nixxes added the adaptive streaming to the game sometime in the last year or 2. His statement could have been true, especially if the context was "as-is" on a PS4 or external HDD on PS5. 720p/Ultra Low isn't "as is". I'm sure DF will test it at Recommend/High/RT on different drives to get an idea of the baseline drive needed for PS5 quality. I'd guess a SATA SSD will do the trick.
 
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Gamerguy84

Member
When the console came out it showcased all the new tech inside. There are games more impressive with loading than ratchet. It was still a cool feat back then to load up a new world while going through a Rift.
 

Corndog

Banned
He didn't say it was impossible. Clearly he was not taking into account Direct Storage compression which is why he was talking about the data being uncompressed.
How about this quote. He’s responding to you.
People need to just relax and realize that SSDs (in general) will make some things possible that a HDD isn't capable of.

No idea why some people take offense to the PS5s SSD when similar is possible on other SSDs.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
How about this quote. He’s responding to you.

Well he does say he is speaking generally. I don't think that is necessarily an incorrect statement. If we go by these system requirements for R&C where SSD is required to achieve higher performance then that would seem to indicate exactly what he was saying.
 

Corndog

Banned
Well he does say he is speaking generally. I don't think that is necessarily an incorrect statement. If we go by these system requirements for R&C where SSD is required to achieve higher performance then that would seem to indicate exactly what he was saying.
Did they say R&C is only possible on PS5 or did they say R&C is only possible because of the PS5's fast SSD?

"Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a game that utilizes dimensions and dimensional rifts, and that would not have been possible without the solid state drive of the PlayStation 5," Smith said."

Edit:Nice quote. Those lying developers.
 
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Topher

Identifies as young
Kill Me Smh GIF
 
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Hoddi

Member
No offense, but in 2023 who the fuck is running modern games off a mechanical HDD? A 1TB SATA or M.2 NVMe drive is like $35-45. That will get you like 500MB/s(SATA) or 3500MB/s(NVMe).
I have most of my games on a 6TB HDD but with a 480GB SATA SSD cache. It works really well and I mostly can't tell the difference from games running on my NVMe drive.

I wouldn't dream of using it without the cache though. I'm interested to see how well it works in R&C.
 

Hoddi

Member
It 100% does require the SSD. Unless you want to play at 720p.
Resolution has nothing to do with whether it runs on HDD or not. The question is whether it can run well at medium/high settings when using an HDD. Doesn't matter if it's 720p or 4k.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Resolution has nothing to do with whether it runs on HDD or not. The question is whether it can run well at medium/high settings when using an HDD. Doesn't matter if it's 720p or 4k.

I agree with you, but I'm also wondering why they say SSD is required for the higher performance targets.

L1dyZjB.png
 

ShadowNate

Member
What even is these news? Is this the gotcha on the marketing of the developer and Sony for a game that was a PS exclusive?

Sure it will run in HDD. Will the PC port run well on it provided the PC port will be a good one at all (very doubtful at day one)?
Will it be as fun to play with a mechanical drive? How much longer will the loading times be?
 

Hoddi

Member
I agree with you, but I'm also wondering why they say SSD is required for the higher performance targets.

L1dyZjB.png
You mean for running at 60fps as opposed to 30fps? I don't read too much into that, to be honest. I think that the 30fps reference has more to do with the CPU and GPU rather than the disk it's running off.

Running off HDD might show some delayed texture loads and longer loading times. But I don't really think it will affect framerate as such.
 
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CrustyBritches

Gold Member
I have most of my games on a 6TB HDD but with a 480GB SATA SSD cache. It works really well and I mostly can't tell the difference from games running on my NVMe drive.

I wouldn't dream of using it without the cache though. I'm interested to see how well it works in R&C.
Interesting. So how does that setup work? I remember the hybrid HDD/SSD drives they had like FireCuda. It was a mechanical drive with onboard cache to speed them up. On Steam Deck, many game loading times are CPU-limited, so there's not much difference between SSD(2400MB/s) and microSD(100MB/s). Especially PS4-gen games are that way. As the PS5 gen rolls on I'd expect more games to rely on at least SATA SSD speeds. IIRC the Valley of the Ancients UE5 demo was using ~300-400MB/s when I tried it.

Looking forward to seeing your results! Didn't mean to shit on you or anything. I just figured most people moved on for gaming, but I understand the benefits of mechanical for backup and media storage(I have an 8TB external USB drive for that purpose).
 
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ChiefDada

Gold Member
I think real time opening rift sequence and camera wipes between levels will be off the table and instead will all be video clips, similar to how they treated HFW on PS4. Literally every visual feature that made Ratchet the PS5 showcase that it was will be removed. Hence my labeling of comparison between PS5 and PC minimum/"very low" settings as disingenuous. It's weird how some want to downplay Sony's pioneering of storage tech 3 YEARS AGO, but if it makes them feel better about themselves I'm all for it.
 

twilo99

Member
Yes yes direct storage is great tech, gg MS and the developer for supporting it.

Now, can we please have more games that have support for this.

Starfield probably won’t lol
 
Dude! I am fucking AMPED to try out Direct Storage out on this game. This is one of the few games where I feel it will utilize the shit out of my rig.
I wanted to buy Forspoken to try it out, but I don't want to pay for a game that I don't hold in high regard, as it would be a glorified Direct Storage demo for me.

After seeing all of the nice photos of the game, provided by the GAF community here, I was sold; especially seeing limited gameplay.
 

Three

Gold Member
Resolution has nothing to do with whether it runs on HDD or not. The question is whether it can run well at medium/high settings when using an HDD. Doesn't matter if it's 720p or 4k.
They're going off the article that the thread is created from

"While this news benefits those still using older PCs with HDDs, the official specs page notes that the game can only be played at 720p and 30fps with a hard drive. Higher settings will reportedly require an SSD, as shown in the above image."

Of course a lot of people including the article jump to conclusions and ignore the nuance of what they're saying. minimum spec is HDD and even then it recommends an SSD for that minimum.
NSuJedpggmLPX4we9wDX2K-970-80.jpg

Judging by the 8GB RAM limit I would say the low and high settings vary considerably and high will probably struggle to run with a slow HDD. Then again, Direct Storage might allow a beefier GPU to offset data throughput requirements at the cost of some GPU power.
 
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Skifi28

Member
wait the PR wasn't 100% truth .... i'm shocked SHOCKED
anyway water is wet
I don't really have a horse in this race, but if you need 2023 technology that wasn't available at the time to make it work on an HDD, then wouldn't that make the statement correct at the time?
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
This is a Seagate Barracuda 2TB with the BulkLoadDemo compiled with Direct Storage 1.2
1.47GB/s is really impressive stuff for an old Hard Drive.

[IMG]
I'm really excited to see DirectStorage 1.2 in action. It's too bad that this thread has devolved into system warring rather than talking about what benefits the tech can bring to ancient SSDs and even HDDs.
 

Snake29

Banned
wait the PR wasn't 100% truth .... i'm shocked SHOCKED
anyway water is wet

R&C has been in development before 2019. Direct Storage for PC or anything that could help make room for the CPU wasn't really there other then some other smaller software solutions. The PS5 has it's own solution to handle these tasks which won't require resources from CPU or GPU.
 

winjer

Gold Member
I'm really excited to see DirectStorage 1.2 in action. It's too bad that this thread has devolved into system warring rather than talking about what benefits the tech can bring to ancient SSDs and even HDDs.

DS 1.2 doesn't bring that much above DS 1.1
It has some improvements for HDDs and it's faster for PCI Gen5 SSDs.
But for SATA and PCIe Gen4 and Gen3, there is almost no gains in performance.

Maybe I should post the compiled version of the BulkLoadDemo with Ds 1.2, so people can test it.
I don't know if there are many people here interested in it.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
I'm really excited to see DirectStorage 1.2 in action. It's too bad that this thread has devolved into system warring rather than talking about what benefits the tech can bring to ancient SSDs and even HDDs.
I think the greatest benefit is that it gives devs even less reasons not to use it. Now they can benefit by targeting lower specs alongside improving the experience on new hardware.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
No offense, but in 2023 who the fuck is running modern games off a mechanical HDD? A 1TB SATA or M.2 NVMe drive is like $35-45. That will get you like 500MB/s(SATA) or 3500MB/s(NVMe).

It's an academic interest more than a real use case.

Peoples will drool at the Digital Foundry analysis of it, then shrug it off a few days later and install the game on..... you guessed it.. an SSD.

I've been on SSD for ~13-15 years
 

Buggy Loop

Member
This is a Seagate Barracuda 2TB with the BulkLoadDemo compiled with Direct Storage 1.2
1.47GB/s is really impressive stuff for an old Hard Drive.

[IMG]


Makes me wonder, what would stop DirectStorage implementation on older Xbox One? Since it's an API for directX12, which is supported on that console, wouldn't that potentially boost loading times?
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
DS 1.2 doesn't bring that much above DS 1.1
It has some improvements for HDDs and it's faster for PCI Gen5 SSDs.
But for SATA and PCIe Gen4 and Gen3, there is almost no gains in performance.

Maybe I should post the compiled version of the BulkLoadDemo with Ds 1.2, so people can test it.
I don't know if there are many people here interested in it.
It's the GPU decompression part that interests me the most. I know it was available in 1.1 but I believe either Forspoken did not use it or shipped with 1.0 (or maybe it was updated to 1.1)?
I think the greatest benefit is that it gives devs even less reasons not to use it. Now they can benefit by targeting lower specs alongside improving the experience on new hardware.
Not holding my breath for this. They will have to change their storage subsystem to take advantage of DS 1.2 and it seems not too many are interested in doing that. Cloud Imperium Games for instance changed their entire storage subsystem for Star Citizen and saw massive gains when it comes to loading assets and load times from an SSD to the point that an HDD is effectively unusable for that game. The possibility has been there for years but nobody has bothered. Consoles had HDDs until 2020 and even now the lowest spec PCs have HDDs so developers as is usual took the path of least resistance and changed nothing. Even without DirectStorage into play, they could have done things to take much better advantage of SSDs. DS has been available for a long time now and it's the first game that will fully use it and it's a port by Sony.
 
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winjer

Gold Member
It's the GPU decompression part that interests me the most. I know it was available in 1.1 but I believe either Forspoken did not use it or shipped with 1.0 (or maybe it was updated to 1.1)?

I think Forspoken was released with the 1.1 dlls. But the game only used DS 1.0
 
I think real time opening rift sequence and camera wipes between levels will be off the table and instead will all be video clips,

I think you are overestimating how much effort Nixxes is going to put into this. They must have decided that between DS 1.2 and slashing the texture resolution, that was enough to make it work on a platter drive without too much effort.
 
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