On the face of it, last week wasn’t exactly crammed with gigaton news announcements – and so we were expecting a fair light edition of DF Direct Weekly, but the announcement that Ratchet and Clank is coming to PC next month changed all of that. It may not be a game designed to appeal to the core PC audience, but how well the port turns out is crucial to the future of the PC format.
If that sounds somewhat hyperbolic, allow me to explain. The new consoles have much in common with PC: they are based on x86 processors, they use Radeon graphics and they have SSDs. These have been staple components of a mainstream gaming PC for many years before the arrival of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2020. However, Ratchet and Clank leans in heavily to proprietary PS5 components and their equivalents in the PC space have yet to be established nor have they been battle-tested in a triple-A release. Ratchet and Clank looks set to change that.
Let’s spell out the challenge here. Insomniac’s game is built from the ground up for PlayStation 5. With its rich visuals, ultra-fast loading and portal mechanic that literally zips you between dimensions within the blink of an eye, it’s heavily reliant on two aspects of the PlayStation 5: its solid-state storage and its hardware decompression blocks. The SSD streams in data at lighting speeds, the decompression blocks take care of losslessly decompressing the data for the game to use.
On the PC side of things, legacy storage APIs are in desperate need of updating, while there are no hardware equivalents to the hardware compression blocks, meaning that developer Nixxes has to tap into new technologies to produce solutions that will scale across a range of PC hardware. It could go horribly wrong – and it did go horribly wrong with The Last of Us Part 1’s PC port, which is far less reliant on the PS5’s innovative hardware. So how can Ratchet and Clank work on PC – and across a range of PC hardware, no less?
00:00:00 Introduction00:01:08 News 01: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart coming to PC!00:19:38 News 02: Nvidia demos AI-generated NPC conversations00:37:54 News 03: Dolphin emulator blocked from Steam release00:44:41 News 04: Redfall’s development issues detailed00:54:56 News 05: HDMI 2.1 capture cards announced – but there’s a catch!01:02:27 Supporter Q1: What are your predictions for next week’s Xbox showcase?01:07:52 Supporter Q2: Does XMP make a big difference on DDR5 RAM?01:10:36 Supporter Q3: Are plasma TVs viable for high-quality retro gaming?01:14:54 Supporter Q4: Why doesn’t the Switch support HDR? Could it be included in a Switch 2?01:16:32 Supporter Q5: Are we in a downwards spiral of declining developer output and GPU stagnation?01:22:34 Supporter Q6: If a game runs at a locked 30fps or 60fps, is there any benefit to setting your console to 120Hz output?01:25:55 Supporter Q7: Has Jensen’s prophecy been fulfilled already? Is Gran Turismo 7 ever going to hit PCs?
There have been no official announcements on Nixxes plans to make this port happen, but adopting Naughty Dog’s ‘solution’ in The Last of Us Part 1 simply won’t work. In that case, the decompression work carried out ‘for free’ on the PlayStation 5 hardware was instead sent to the CPU instead, resulting in an extremely heavy processor overhead that meant that the 60fps standard established in the PS5 version was off the table for equivalent PC components. The game streams in and decompresses data as you play, which can overwhelm less capable hardware and reduces performance on all CPUs. It’s a solution that isn’t ideal in that game and totally unfit for purpose for Ratchet and Clank.