DirectStorage 1.2 Activated – Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be the first PC game to support this feature

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be the first game to support DirectStorage 1.2 on PC

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is launching on PC on July 26th, and it is due to be one of the most advanced PC releases of 2023. In a now deleted post on Steam, Nixxes Software have confirmed that Rift Apart will feature support for DirectStorage 1.2, a first for a PC game, and support more advanced ray tracing than the game’s PlayStation 5 counterpart. 

With DirectStorage 1.2, GPU Decompression is available to speed up asset streaming, transitioning what would normally be a CPU load to the user’s GPU. This shift frees up CPU time, and can allow data decompression to be completed faster. Not only can this boost the performance of games and decrease loading times, but it also allows developers to more quickly stream in high quality textures and other game assets, enabling higher levels of graphical fidelity. 

While there have been other games that have supported DirectStorage, none of these games supported DirectStorage 1.2, which meant that DirectStorage ran on the user’s CPU. This limited the potential benefits of DirectStorage, as GPUs can complete these data streaming loads faster.

Below is what Nixxes had to say about DirectStorage in their deleted Steam post. 

    To enable quick loading and instant transition between dimensions, the game needs to be able to load assets quickly. DirectStorage ensures quick loading times and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while playing. Traditionally, this decompression is handled by the CPU, but at a certain point there is an advantage to letting the GPU handle this, as this enables a higher bandwidth for streaming assets from storage to the graphics card. We use this to quickly load high-quality textures and environments with a high level of detail.

On PC, Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart will also feature extensive support for ray tracing, offering gamers more ray traced effects than the game’s PlayStation 5 version. Rift Apart will support ray traced ambient occlusion, ray traced shadows, and ray traced reflections. On PlayStation 5, only ray traced reflections were supported.

Additionally, the PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart supports high detail upscaling in the form of Nvidia DLSS 3, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), Intel XeSS, and Insomniac’s own Temporal Injection technique.

You can join the discussion on Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart supporting DirectStorage on PC on the OC3D Forums.