When I spent an arm, a leg, and a kidney on this RTX 4090, the first thing I pondered was which games to throw at it first. Obviously, Steam is littered with PC exclusive graphical delights, but I developed a weird interest in seeing how far ported PlayStation (launch) exclusives could be pushed.
With the glaring exception of The Last of Us Part 1, ported PS Studios AAAs have been more or less mind-blowing on a decent rig. (Horizon, Spider-Man, and God of War, I’m looking and drooling in your particular directions.) As you can imagine, my ears pricked up to Lombax length at the announcement of a PC bound Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart—one of the prettiest jewels in the PS crown.
Why so? Because it, along with Housemarque’s Returnal, are among the first games to cast off the shackles of the last-gen. Insomniac Games was completely unfettered by the need to scale down and run this bold, dimension-hopping platformer on 2013-era PS4 tech. Hell, if the marketing line is to be believed, said multiverse of madness was only made possible by the power of the PS5’s internal SSD. (A dubious statement now, given this PC port can apparently achieve this feat on a decent spec HDD.)
Curious claims aside, the gameplay of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart hasn’t aged a day since 2021. That being the case, and If top-tier graphics fidelity isn’t your bag because you simply want a cracking 3D platformer on PC, let's sort you with the cheapest price right now…
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Best PC Deals
System Requirements
Spec wise, you’re looking at the following requirements.
If visuals are your primary concern, let’s get to the big question. How has Ratchet’s double-jump from Console Land to The PC dimension gone? I sure would like to tell you it all went flawlessly but the truth is developer Nixxes has had some tiny teething issues. But I’d prefer to start with the overwhelming positives first…
Personally, I burned through the opening act of this game using a rig near the apex of the above table. The only difference, I'm rocking an i7 12700K with 16GB of DDR4. It's also worth noting I had Rift Apart installed on a lightning fast 2TB, Samsung 990 Pro. This is my first outing with this particular SSD and Samsung insists it’s a ‘champion maker’. More specifically, it delivers "a 55% improvement in power efficiency over its predecessor (the 980 PRO) to enable faster loads for ultimate gaming realism on PlayStation 5 and DirectStorage PC games". Which, given the circumstances, sounded right up my alley.
Lastly, the final ingredient that I think delivers on "the best way to play" requirement is the screen being used. For all its fancy features, the PS5 lacks Ultra-Wide (21:9) and Super Ultra-Wide (32:9) support, not to mention it tops out at 120fps support versus the uncapped frame rates offered here. Fortunately, a large corner of my game cave belongs to a 32:9 behemoth—a 144hz capable Samsung 49 CHG90 QLED Ultra-Wide. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this bad boy delivers a non-standard 3840 x 1080 resolution that nebulously sits somewhere between 4K and 1440p.
Early Hands On Impressions
Firstly, I cannot overstate the wow-factor of the opening moments of Rift Apart on a 32:9 screen cranked beyond 120fps and with every option set to Very High. It’s an all-out ocular assault walking out into a space station teeming with alien crowds, confetti, fireworks and a variety of hovering platforms and parade day floats.
As veterans will already know, the visual splendour builds considerably from there. In no time flat, I’m trading ordinance with evil croc-dudes, rail-riding, grav-booting enemy arses while upside down, and, of course, flinging myself through a variety of dimensions.
I’d like to say the latter goes off without a hitch, but that’s not entirely true. Certainly, the hyper-fast world transitions play out as they do on PS5, but I did note one transition where I pinged out into a cityscape devoid of the scripted platform to land on. Sure enough, a checkpoint restart fixed the problem. Indeed, it may have been a consequence of me spamming the screenshot capture function. Something to look for.
When it comes to finer details and PC enhancements, there are indeed bells and whistles to brag about. First of all, kudos to Nixxes for throwing in a toggleable launcher that allows pre-game configing (along with the obvious in-game options). It’s a small but welcomed creature comfort.
Oh, and speaking of those, it’s nice to see (the expected return of) smaller tweakables, like shadow / texture quality, and post-process / motion blur switches. A FOV slider is also something of a rarity for third-person shooters as well. From memory, the PS5 version didn’t have that. And yeah—when used in conjunction with a 32:9 display, the peripehal tactical awareness makes some of those arena fights so much easier.
Sadly, our image uploader doesn’t really do textures set to Very High with 16x Anisotropic filtering full justice—it’s one of those "you have to see it in the flesh" things. Or is that fur? It’s also great to see support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation support (which my RTX 40-Series took full advantage of), along with DLSS, FSR 2.1, XeSS, and IGTI upscaling support.
And when it comes to hardware raytracing, the results I got were mighty impressive when I did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons with Rift Apart’s venerable Performance RT mode on PS5. The most obvious improvements in this PC version are the sumptuous RT ambient occlusion and RT shadows, which are probably best demonstrated in the official tech trailer here...
In short, I’m still early hours with this (thanks to belated review code), but what’s here looks tighter than a thoroughly omni-wrenched bolt. I’ve also heard nothing but good news about the scalability of this in regards to the Steam Deck, something I look forwards to testing once I can bring myself to put this controller down.
That being any time soon is not looking likely, though. Even though I’ve smashed through Rift Apart twice before—once to unlock Renegade Legend and then a back-to-back on said difficulty—I’m hooked all over again. You can chalk that up to two things: it’s a testament to how great Insomniac are at their 3D platforming craft, and how phenomenal this all looks now in 2023.
The Gear
Adam Mathew is our Aussie deals wrangler. He plays practically everything, often on YouTube. He barely tweets.
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