Early on in the PS5’s life, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s dimension hopping shenanigans were claimed to only be possible with a solid state drive (SSD). Now that the game is on another platform, one capable of using an old-school physical harddrive, it seems that actually was true.
Unlike the PS4, which shipped with a mechanical hard drive that has a literal, spinny physical disc inside, the PS5 (and Xbox Series X/S too) feature SSDs for storage; these use flash storage and have no mechanical moving parts inside. The advantages of this tech include remarkably faster load times and way smaller sizes for the drives. And while physical hard drives might still have an advantage for backups and long-term storage solutions, SSDs are an absolute necessity for reasonable load times (as well as operating system performance on PC). Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on PC is now proving that the faster load times aren’t just about convenience: In certain cases, running the game on an HDD approaches unplayable levels.
Technically, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart can run on a PC with an HDD—this iss somewhat notable because during the game’s initial promotion, marketing materials said that was impossible. . But as John Linneman of Digital Foundry has documented on…X certain HDD’s (like a stock PS4 drive) do not play well with the game:
If for some reason you are stuck with an HDD, the faster the spin time the better. In a later tweet, Linneman said that a 7200 RPM drive (paired with an i9 processor and 64gb of ram, mind you) brought much better results.
If you have an SSD and a great PC, you can expect a pretty great experience for Rift Apart. Unlike that Last of Us port, Ratchet & Clank’s visual fidelity appears to exceed the PS5 in many clear areas and can scale down quite well to budget machines—just make sure you’re not using a HDD from 10 years ago.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is currently available on PC via Steam.