In a post on Steam, that has been removed, Nixxes Software revealed some new interesting tech details about Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC. According to the team, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will support DirectStorage with GPU Decompression on PC, as well as Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion.

This is huge news as RTAO can significantly improve visuals in shadowy areas. We’ve seen this in numerous games, like Metro: Exodus and F1 23. Thus, we are really happy that Nixxes will be using RTAO in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

As the developers explained:

“Ambient occlusion is a technique used in games to simulate how ambient lighting affects a scene. Ambient lighting is a form of indirect lighting: the light reflected from other surfaces. This effect mostly appears at creases, cracks, and corners where surfaces are close to each other. Commonly used AO techniques are SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and HBAO+ (Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion). These are not very demanding on the hardware, but they do not provide physically accurate results. RTAO utilizes ray-tracing to further enhance the realism of ambient occlusion in the game. We have implemented RTAO as an addition for those with high-end systems with ray-tracing compatible hardware and processing power to spare.”

Alongside RTAO, the game will also support XeGTAO. XeGTAO is another Ambient Occlusion technique, comparable to HBAO+. What’s also cool is that, according to Nixxes, all GPUs from all vendors will support this Ambient Occlusion setting. XeGTAO generates a very high-resolution ambient occlusion that shows even the smallest details in geometry, resulting in a very high output quality.

Lastly, Nixxes confirmed that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will support DirectStorage with GPU decompression. This is most likely the first game that will be taking advantage of GPU decompression for DirectStorage. After all, Forspoken used DirectStorage’s CPU decompression.

As Nixxes stated:

“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.”

Do note that all SATA SSDs (and even traditional hard disk drives) can take advantage of DirectStorage. This isn’t exclusive to NVMe SSDs.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is coming to PC on July 26th. You can also find here its official PC system requirements.

Stay tuned for more!